By 'prior art' might you be suggesting 'copyright'?
Graham Hobbs
----- Original Message -----
From: "John Gilmore" <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, January 11, 2013 11:48 AM
Subject: Re: OT: IBM #1 in number of patents for 2012. It's 20th year in a
row to do so.
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
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
