5 ms·

I suppose its worth noting that IBM folks received a record 9,262 U.S. patents in 2019 - the most patents ever awarded to a U.S. company and the 27th consecutiv

I suppose its worth noting that IBM folks received a record 9,262 U.S. patents in 2019 - the most patents ever awarded to a U.S. company and the 27th consecutive year of it grabbing the no.1 patent spot. No idea how valuable or inovative any of these patents are, but I think its important to note when discussing: "They're never going to look like they're on the cutting edge of some space"

bluGill 7y ago
Appearing on the cutting edge to enterprise clients is important to IBM. That doesn't mean they are on the cutting edge (they might or might not be). IBM's large pool of patents is something they can advertise to clients. Most companies don't see their patents as valuable, and thus don't patent as much stuff. I've worked with former IBM people - all (or some it seems) of them have a plaque of whatever their first patent was. When they talk about it they admit it was a trivial invention that is too specific to be of much use outside the one project (thus there is no value in keeping it from competitors). IBM encourages patenting everything and has people looking for things to patent. Most other companies only patent things that are unique and worth the costs. (keeping from competitors, licensing to competitors, or keeping competitors from patenting it and stopping your use)
- rtkwe 7y ago
  I'm really waiting for the day that software patents are finally struck down and we can stop this farce of pretending software patents are actually useful and valuable beyond being a cudgel in legal battles.
  - vikramkr 7y ago
    Being a cudgel in legal battles is quite a lot of value though, that's basically the point and is how patents are meant to support and reward innovation.
    - ouid 7y ago
      youve gone from point a to point b rather discontinuously with this argument
      - vikramkr 7y ago
        It's not discontinuous - that's just the theory behind patents. Patents give inventors a legal "cudgel" as the commenter before put it, which makes innovation more profitable. Patents are just a legal construct, the idea is that having a patent on an invention gives you access to legal tools to protect a temporary monopoly which makes innovation more profitable, so you don't have to worry about investing money in innovation and then losing all of your profits because of copycats. However well that actually works and whether or not it ends up being a net positive for innovation is a different question, but all a patent is is a legal tool to stop others from using or making money off of your innovation, as enforced through lawsuits in the court system.
    - rtkwe 7y ago
      There's a second part to the idea of patents though they protect innovations with the idea that once they expire other people can implement them and software patents fail abjectly at that second. There's no meat the the implementation, all modern software patents seem to boil down to connect a client to a server and display the results on an interface. There were some genuinely useful patents back in the 80s it looks like for stuff like MP3 encoding. Also there should be some additional value to people not just companies for the government to be granting legal monopolies, and it should also be restricted to things that are actually implementable not extremely vague system level diagrams.
      - vikramkr 7y ago
        From what I understand, those sorts of vague software patents are far far harder to get today - in theory they never should have been granted. Unfortunately, mistakes were made, but in recent years the legal system is catching up to that, and hopefully as those older patents expire newer patents along those lines won't be granted "On June 19, 2014 the United States Supreme Court ruled in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International that 'merely requiring generic computer implementation fails to transform [an] abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention'" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_United_States_patent_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_United_...
  - Angostura 7y ago
    These aren't only software patents
    - rtkwe 7y ago
      I'm not knocking them for their materials or process patents for some of their remaining R&D arms but the majority probably are software patents which I think are 95-99% unusable garbage outside of a legal fight. Generally software patents are too broad and don't contain enough implementation detail to actually use them once they do expire which is one of the important parts of the bargain for patent protection initially.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    I've seen some awful code that I wished was patented just so that nobody would be able to make that mistake...
  - stuzenz 7y ago
    This might be of interest: I just finished (a light) editing of an English (machine translated) version of a book for someone I have a lot of respect for who is a Japan-based mentor of mine - Hiroshi Maruyama had 26 years in IBM research, eventually as the director of IBM Tokyo Research Labs. In one chapter of the book he provides a view across a possible way to fix the patent system which I found interesting. It referenced ideas from the following paper - https://www.ibm.com/ibm/files/S376023B46442F89/building_a_new_ip_marketplace-report.pdf https://www.ibm.com/ibm/files/S376023B46442F89/building_a_ne... Some of the key points of the IP marketplace were - fees for the licensee fee would be set upfront; - the patentee would pay a % value to the government as a tax; - if the patentee wanted to use the patent exclusively, a high licensing fee could be set, but that would also result in a higher tax being due to be paid. The approach was to dis-incentivize bad actors putting monopolies on products via patents. It would also encourage higher utility value from patents under this system. Another interesting concept Maruyama's book covered was LOT networks used to fight against Trolls. - https://lotnet.com/ https://lotnet.com/ The idea with the Lot network was that if a patent did get rights to a patent from a member of the lot network, If any of the patents from members falls into the hands of a patent troll, all other members are automatically granted a free license of the patent. The book covers themes on how to do research in corporate organizations (the audience focus remains with Japanese researchers/students) and has some interesting discussions. I will provide a link to the book when it is available (if there is interest). The book is an updated version of this Japanese book: https://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/product/4764903822/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0 https://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/product/4764903822/ref=dbs_a_def...
    - rtkwe 7y ago
      Maybe, it certainly sounds much better at a glance than the current system though there's tough stuff like how to set that value in such a way that independent inventors aren't forced to partner with a large company in order to use the patent system. I think some reforms like that combined with a much stricter definition of "patent-able" for some categories and/or better challenge mechanisms. Getting a bad patent thrown out due to prior art is still quite expensive and trying to evaluate if a patent is non-obvious is quite difficult to litigate.
    - 7y ago
- gowld 7y ago
  Is IBM unique in its patent techniques? If so, why? Top patenters of 2017: IBM Samsung LG Intel Canon(!) Alphabet Qualcomm (!) Toyota Microsoft Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (fab for AMD and other chip designs)
  - bluGill 7y ago
    There is a continuum. IBM patents everything. The other companies find patents less useful (for whatever reason) and so they are more careful about what they will spend money patenting. I've made several "inventions" that I'm sure any of the companies on your list would have patented, but since I don't work for them I don't have any patents.
  - saxonww 7y ago
    My guess is that these companies are a lot more aggressive internally about getting their employees to author patent submissions. They either actively screen code submissions and projects for patentable ideas, make patent authorship a condition of advancement, or otherwise tie authorship to performance reviews in a meaningful way. Companies I've worked for have teams that facilitate employee patent submissions, and they will tell you why patenting is important to the company. They have had some kind of bonus structure so that you get rewarded if you submit a successful patent. But they pay well enough otherwise that, unless you're personally motivated to see your name attached to patents, it's just not worth the effort. To put this another way: the patents you author as an employee of a company are probably not that valuable to you. But, because of the potential legal protections they offer, they are very valuable to your employer. I think the companies that are more successful in having high patent counts are doing more to align employee interest with corporate interest w/r/t patents.
- acomjean 7y ago
  I worked at IBM Research (Yorktown Hieghts, Last century, assisting infrastructure for research). They spent 6 Billion Dollars on research that year (late 90s) But Its true, IBM Values patents quite heavily. You can see some of them they printed as wall paper in the lobby (Along with mechanical calculators and models of some of daVinci's machines.) But they also have "Trade Secrets" which are things they think they're competitors won't figure out and if you don't patent it you aren't telling the world how its done. I think some of the chip chemicals and processes for working with silicon wafers were to be classified as such. They seemed always to be pushing the researchers to make something they could sell.. As an aside, IBM Yorktown is an oddly round building.. https://www.google.com/maps/place/IBM+Thomas+J.+Watson+Research+Center/@41.2112567,-73.8057614,3403m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m13!1m7!3m6!1s0x89c2b6f9d1af4137:0x3cf5f7d8ffb1755a!2sYorktown+Heights,+NY+10598!3b1!8m2!3d41.2709274!4d-73.7776336!3m4!1s0x0:0x457b245b452ccf23!8m2!3d41.2097521!4d-73.8026467 https://www.google.com/maps/place/IBM+Thomas+J.+Watson+Resea...
  - monocasa 7y ago
    > I think some of the chip chemicals and processes for working with silicon wafers were to be classified as such. They sold off their chip foundries and all IP to GloFo a half decade ago (and since then GloFlo has stopped all non sustaining R&D).
  - devy 7y ago
    A few years ago, one of my buddies got a research scientist job at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center at Yorktown Heights and I got a friend&family pass visiting their building there - inside it's amazing, considering this was built in 1950s. I remember there was a long hallway with invention exhibits, some of the most iconic inventions in computer hardware, ICs, CPUs were on display. Pretty amazing. The arc-shape building reminded me Apple Park in Cupertino, except TJ Watson center was built decades earlier.
    - acomjean 7y ago
      I did enjoy the building. Rather a lot of interesting stuff was thought up there and it was humbling. I like that the hallway was on the outside and hallways radiated out (and everyone had offices with frosted glass). It was a pain running pipes though as standard bend didn't quite work for that radius. https://picryl.com/media/ibm-thomas-j-watson-research-center-yorktown-heights-new-york-1956-61-interior-8d33a4?zoom=true https://picryl.com/media/ibm-thomas-j-watson-research-center... https://picryl.com/media/ibm-thomas-j-watson-research-center-yorktown-heights-new-york-1956-61-exterior-1 https://picryl.com/media/ibm-thomas-j-watson-research-center... The library was a trip too. It was like what they thought the future of furniture was in the the 1960s. It was all in excellent shape.
- senderista 7y ago
  I’ve thrown all my patent plaques in the trash, twice, when I changed jobs. There was nothing there to be remotely proud of.
  - redis_mlc 7y ago
    I went to an estate sale for a famous SV chip inventor. He had a 6' tall metal filing cabinet full of lucite plaques. In the farthest corner of the garage. It was all binned later that day.
lolkkhhty 7y ago
As an ex-IBMer, I can tell you they really incentivize patents. IIRC, you get $1000+ on your first patent and pretty decent money on subsequent patents. Many employees form 4-5 person teams where each member basically work on their own patent but their name is listed on all patent applications submitted by their team. This way even if 4 out of 5 patents are rejected, team still has 1 approved patent and everyone in team wins some money.
zaat 7y ago
If you listen to Lin Sun interview on Google's Kubernetes Podcast you hear that she have the title Master Inventor. Since she is interviewed under the title of Istio I was sure she invented some interesting techincal stuff in that field. You don't have to wait too long for (at least what I find as) the disappointing explanation of what does the title mean, why it exists and what the results are. In short, there's incentive as well as assistance in filling up patents, they don't seem to discriminate on basis of usability, feasibility or anything else. They do give bigger bonuses for patents that are in one of the fields considered strategic for the company. Listening to it was somewhere between amusing to depressing: https://kubernetespodcast.com/episode/086-invention-ibm-istio/ https://kubernetespodcast.com/episode/086-invention-ibm-isti...

bluGill 7y ago

Appearing on the cutting edge to enterprise clients is important to IBM. That doesn't mean they are on the cutting edge (they might or might not be). IBM's large pool of patents is something they can advertise to clients. Most companies don't see their patents as valuable, and thus don't patent as much stuff. I've worked with former IBM people - all (or some it seems) of them have a plaque of whatever their first patent was. When they talk about it they admit it was a trivial invention that is too specific to be of much use outside the one project (thus there is no value in keeping it from competitors). IBM encourages patenting everything and has people looking for things to patent. Most other companies only patent things that are unique and worth the costs. (keeping from competitors, licensing to competitors, or keeping competitors from patenting it and stopping your use)

rtkwe 7y ago
I'm really waiting for the day that software patents are finally struck down and we can stop this farce of pretending software patents are actually useful and valuable beyond being a cudgel in legal battles.
- vikramkr 7y ago
  Being a cudgel in legal battles is quite a lot of value though, that's basically the point and is how patents are meant to support and reward innovation.
  - ouid 7y ago
    youve gone from point a to point b rather discontinuously with this argument
    - vikramkr 7y ago
      It's not discontinuous - that's just the theory behind patents. Patents give inventors a legal "cudgel" as the commenter before put it, which makes innovation more profitable. Patents are just a legal construct, the idea is that having a patent on an invention gives you access to legal tools to protect a temporary monopoly which makes innovation more profitable, so you don't have to worry about investing money in innovation and then losing all of your profits because of copycats. However well that actually works and whether or not it ends up being a net positive for innovation is a different question, but all a patent is is a legal tool to stop others from using or making money off of your innovation, as enforced through lawsuits in the court system.
  - rtkwe 7y ago
    There's a second part to the idea of patents though they protect innovations with the idea that once they expire other people can implement them and software patents fail abjectly at that second. There's no meat the the implementation, all modern software patents seem to boil down to connect a client to a server and display the results on an interface. There were some genuinely useful patents back in the 80s it looks like for stuff like MP3 encoding. Also there should be some additional value to people not just companies for the government to be granting legal monopolies, and it should also be restricted to things that are actually implementable not extremely vague system level diagrams.
    - vikramkr 7y ago
      From what I understand, those sorts of vague software patents are far far harder to get today - in theory they never should have been granted. Unfortunately, mistakes were made, but in recent years the legal system is catching up to that, and hopefully as those older patents expire newer patents along those lines won't be granted "On June 19, 2014 the United States Supreme Court ruled in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International that 'merely requiring generic computer implementation fails to transform [an] abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention'" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_United_States_patent_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_United_...
- Angostura 7y ago
  These aren't only software patents
  - rtkwe 7y ago
    I'm not knocking them for their materials or process patents for some of their remaining R&D arms but the majority probably are software patents which I think are 95-99% unusable garbage outside of a legal fight. Generally software patents are too broad and don't contain enough implementation detail to actually use them once they do expire which is one of the important parts of the bargain for patent protection initially.
- bluGill 7y ago
  I've seen some awful code that I wished was patented just so that nobody would be able to make that mistake...
- stuzenz 7y ago
  This might be of interest: I just finished (a light) editing of an English (machine translated) version of a book for someone I have a lot of respect for who is a Japan-based mentor of mine - Hiroshi Maruyama had 26 years in IBM research, eventually as the director of IBM Tokyo Research Labs. In one chapter of the book he provides a view across a possible way to fix the patent system which I found interesting. It referenced ideas from the following paper - https://www.ibm.com/ibm/files/S376023B46442F89/building_a_new_ip_marketplace-report.pdf https://www.ibm.com/ibm/files/S376023B46442F89/building_a_ne... Some of the key points of the IP marketplace were - fees for the licensee fee would be set upfront; - the patentee would pay a % value to the government as a tax; - if the patentee wanted to use the patent exclusively, a high licensing fee could be set, but that would also result in a higher tax being due to be paid. The approach was to dis-incentivize bad actors putting monopolies on products via patents. It would also encourage higher utility value from patents under this system. Another interesting concept Maruyama's book covered was LOT networks used to fight against Trolls. - https://lotnet.com/ https://lotnet.com/ The idea with the Lot network was that if a patent did get rights to a patent from a member of the lot network, If any of the patents from members falls into the hands of a patent troll, all other members are automatically granted a free license of the patent. The book covers themes on how to do research in corporate organizations (the audience focus remains with Japanese researchers/students) and has some interesting discussions. I will provide a link to the book when it is available (if there is interest). The book is an updated version of this Japanese book: https://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/product/4764903822/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0 https://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/product/4764903822/ref=dbs_a_def...
  - rtkwe 7y ago
    Maybe, it certainly sounds much better at a glance than the current system though there's tough stuff like how to set that value in such a way that independent inventors aren't forced to partner with a large company in order to use the patent system. I think some reforms like that combined with a much stricter definition of "patent-able" for some categories and/or better challenge mechanisms. Getting a bad patent thrown out due to prior art is still quite expensive and trying to evaluate if a patent is non-obvious is quite difficult to litigate.
  - 7y ago
gowld 7y ago
Is IBM unique in its patent techniques? If so, why? Top patenters of 2017: IBM Samsung LG Intel Canon(!) Alphabet Qualcomm (!) Toyota Microsoft Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (fab for AMD and other chip designs)
- bluGill 7y ago
  There is a continuum. IBM patents everything. The other companies find patents less useful (for whatever reason) and so they are more careful about what they will spend money patenting. I've made several "inventions" that I'm sure any of the companies on your list would have patented, but since I don't work for them I don't have any patents.
- saxonww 7y ago
  My guess is that these companies are a lot more aggressive internally about getting their employees to author patent submissions. They either actively screen code submissions and projects for patentable ideas, make patent authorship a condition of advancement, or otherwise tie authorship to performance reviews in a meaningful way. Companies I've worked for have teams that facilitate employee patent submissions, and they will tell you why patenting is important to the company. They have had some kind of bonus structure so that you get rewarded if you submit a successful patent. But they pay well enough otherwise that, unless you're personally motivated to see your name attached to patents, it's just not worth the effort. To put this another way: the patents you author as an employee of a company are probably not that valuable to you. But, because of the potential legal protections they offer, they are very valuable to your employer. I think the companies that are more successful in having high patent counts are doing more to align employee interest with corporate interest w/r/t patents.
acomjean 7y ago
I worked at IBM Research (Yorktown Hieghts, Last century, assisting infrastructure for research). They spent 6 Billion Dollars on research that year (late 90s) But Its true, IBM Values patents quite heavily. You can see some of them they printed as wall paper in the lobby (Along with mechanical calculators and models of some of daVinci's machines.) But they also have "Trade Secrets" which are things they think they're competitors won't figure out and if you don't patent it you aren't telling the world how its done. I think some of the chip chemicals and processes for working with silicon wafers were to be classified as such. They seemed always to be pushing the researchers to make something they could sell.. As an aside, IBM Yorktown is an oddly round building.. https://www.google.com/maps/place/IBM+Thomas+J.+Watson+Research+Center/@41.2112567,-73.8057614,3403m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m13!1m7!3m6!1s0x89c2b6f9d1af4137:0x3cf5f7d8ffb1755a!2sYorktown+Heights,+NY+10598!3b1!8m2!3d41.2709274!4d-73.7776336!3m4!1s0x0:0x457b245b452ccf23!8m2!3d41.2097521!4d-73.8026467 https://www.google.com/maps/place/IBM+Thomas+J.+Watson+Resea...
- monocasa 7y ago
  > I think some of the chip chemicals and processes for working with silicon wafers were to be classified as such. They sold off their chip foundries and all IP to GloFo a half decade ago (and since then GloFlo has stopped all non sustaining R&D).
- devy 7y ago
  A few years ago, one of my buddies got a research scientist job at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center at Yorktown Heights and I got a friend&family pass visiting their building there - inside it's amazing, considering this was built in 1950s. I remember there was a long hallway with invention exhibits, some of the most iconic inventions in computer hardware, ICs, CPUs were on display. Pretty amazing. The arc-shape building reminded me Apple Park in Cupertino, except TJ Watson center was built decades earlier.
  - acomjean 7y ago
    I did enjoy the building. Rather a lot of interesting stuff was thought up there and it was humbling. I like that the hallway was on the outside and hallways radiated out (and everyone had offices with frosted glass). It was a pain running pipes though as standard bend didn't quite work for that radius. https://picryl.com/media/ibm-thomas-j-watson-research-center-yorktown-heights-new-york-1956-61-interior-8d33a4?zoom=true https://picryl.com/media/ibm-thomas-j-watson-research-center... https://picryl.com/media/ibm-thomas-j-watson-research-center-yorktown-heights-new-york-1956-61-exterior-1 https://picryl.com/media/ibm-thomas-j-watson-research-center... The library was a trip too. It was like what they thought the future of furniture was in the the 1960s. It was all in excellent shape.
senderista 7y ago
I’ve thrown all my patent plaques in the trash, twice, when I changed jobs. There was nothing there to be remotely proud of.
- redis_mlc 7y ago
  I went to an estate sale for a famous SV chip inventor. He had a 6' tall metal filing cabinet full of lucite plaques. In the farthest corner of the garage. It was all binned later that day.

lolkkhhty 7y ago

As an ex-IBMer, I can tell you they really incentivize patents. IIRC, you get $1000+ on your first patent and pretty decent money on subsequent patents. Many employees form 4-5 person teams where each member basically work on their own patent but their name is listed on all patent applications submitted by their team. This way even if 4 out of 5 patents are rejected, team still has 1 approved patent and everyone in team wins some money.

zaat 7y ago

If you listen to Lin Sun interview on Google's Kubernetes Podcast you hear that she have the title Master Inventor. Since she is interviewed under the title of Istio I was sure she invented some interesting techincal stuff in that field. You don't have to wait too long for (at least what I find as) the disappointing explanation of what does the title mean, why it exists and what the results are. In short, there's incentive as well as assistance in filling up patents, they don't seem to discriminate on basis of usability, feasibility or anything else. They do give bigger bonuses for patents that are in one of the fields considered strategic for the company. Listening to it was somewhere between amusing to depressing: https://kubernetespodcast.com/episode/086-invention-ibm-istio/ https://kubernetespodcast.com/episode/086-invention-ibm-isti...