IBM U.S. Patent King For 16th Straight Year

IBM upped its Chamberlain-esque pace of U.S. patents in 2008, earning a record 4,186 to increase its string as No. 1 patent holder to 16 consecutive years, the company announced Wednesday. The computing giant beat out No. 2 Samsung by a comfortable 671 patents, while Canon (2,114 U.S. patents), Microsoft (2,030) and Intel (1,776) rounded out the top five.

While IBM managed to earn an average of 11.5 technical patents per day in 2008 -- or slightly more than one for every 100 people the company employs -- Big Blue said Wednesday it will greatly increase the number of inventions it makes openly available in 2009 rather than seek to protect as intellectual property.

IBM "plans to increase by 50 percent -- to more than 3,000 -- the number of technical inventions it publishes annually instead of seeking patent protection," the company said in a statement. Specific areas where IBM said it generally won't seek patent issuances include open-source software, health care, education, the environment and software interoperability.

Be that as it may, the company couldn't resist a little gloating in Wednesday's patent announcement: "IBM's 2008 patent issuances are nearly triple Hewlett-Packard's and exceed the issuances of Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Apple, EMC, Accenture and Google -- combined."

HP, which in 2006 passed IBM as the largest high-tech company in the world in terms of sales, finished 10th on the 2008 U.S. patent list with 1,424. HP has been concentrating on "the quality of the patents that we seek, as opposed to the quantity," an HP intellectual property lawyer told News.com.

2008 U.S. Patent Leaders

1. IBM -- 4,186
2. Samsung -- 3,515
3. Canon -- 2,114
4. Microsoft -- 2,030
5. Intel -- 1,776
6. Panasonic -- 1,745
7. Toshiba -- 1,609
8. Fujitsu -- 1,494
9. Sony -- 1,485
10. HP -- 1,424

Source: IFI Patent Intelligence

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