A certain amount of IBM's patenting activity is defensive, designed to ensure that someone else will not be able to obtain a patent instead and thus be in a position to exact royalties or market a very similar product/near copy. Pharmaceutical and chemical companies do much the same thing by patenting a number of related compounds defensively, even though their interest is chiefly in just one of them.
IBM also publishes a Disclosure Journal, available in libraries but not I think by subscription, in which it discloses the details of 'inventions' that it does not itself wish to patent in order to make it impossible for others to patent them later. (Patents can be invalidated if "prior art" can be shown to have existed when they were issued.) Patent quality is for these and other reasons an elusive notion; but patent people--many of them are hybrid lawyer-engineer types--mostly take the view that IBM's patents are of very high quality indeed. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
