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This is more because of secrecy (and ignorance). Any company of such scale is engaged in hundreds patent disputes every year at least, maybe thousands, maybe te
by Tooluka 14y ago
This is more because of secrecy (and ignorance). Any company of such scale is engaged in hundreds patent disputes every year at least, maybe thousands, maybe tens of thousands, it really hard even to estimate. And this continues for decades.
Those ten-twenty disputes that made to journals and blogs are in such small amount that they can be counted as statistical deviation and more of PR or anti-PR moves.
Real patent wars are never off, especially for multinationals.
- MrJagil 14y agoGot any sources?
- Tooluka 14y agoI'm extrapolating on all industry actually, but I have a friend in a small (<100) company in ex-USSR that does exclusively patent reverse engineering for Freescale/Motorola. This one company (there are at least several others working for F/M in Czech and few other countries) does at least hundred patent researches per year for 10+ years at least, meaning buying devices by Apple, Samsung, TI, Microsoft etc. demolishing to bare crystal and then photographing layer by layer microscheme structure, restoring it on PC to reverse integral scheme and find patent infringing (and maybe a little more, some interesting tech things that wasn't known publicly, i.e. TI does very innovative tricks that are interesting for F/M). So returning to your question,no, I don't have sources, only second hand experience which I find very believable.
- MrJagil 14y agoInteresting, thanks for clarifying :)
- twoodfin 14y agoThe way I've always heard the story told, IBM actually kept the patent peace in the industry for decades. They have thousands of patents going back to the foundational era of computing, and warehouses full of prior art. They also operated for a decade or so under harsh anti-trust scrutiny, which limited the viability of "offensive" patent use. Instead, if some upstart threatened to corner off key new technology, IBM was always ready to fire back with some "method for utilizing a spinning disk to store structured records" patent. Cross-licensing agreements among the big players were the norm, not patent fights (even the big Microsoft/Apple dustup over the GUI was over copyright, not patents). I see evidence for this folklore in that the biggest technology patent wars we've seen in recent years have focused around wireless, which one might consider the first major new computing technology that IBM didn't take a big part in developing.