The company may top the US's patents league, but IBM still thinks the system is broken.
"With 3,621, IBM surpassed its own record and earned more U.S. patents than any other company for the fourteenth consecutive year, exceeding the next closest patentee by 1,170." But that does not mean that the IT giant is happy with the patent system. It used the opportunity of the annual numbers fest from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to announce its own initiative to "share and debate ideas on how smaller enterprises view patent systems and can contribute to reform efforts such as improved patent quality".
There's the key to the debate here, quality. (For evidence of further problems with the patents system in the USA, check out "Bluetooth and the vampire?" on the Science|Business IPDigest.) There's a whole load of junk filed. and the people with the biggest stake in the process, small companies, don't have a way to make their views heard.
So IBM is setting up an on-line community, the Inventors’ Forum. Beyond fine statements about intentions, it isn't clear what the thing will do.
The announcement of the plan says:
"The prevalence of patent applications that are of low quality or poorly written have led to backlogs of historic proportions, and the granting of patents protecting ideas that are not new, are overly broad, or obvious. IBM believes raising patent quality will encourage continued investment in innovation by individuals, academic institutions and companies of all sizes, while preventing the over-protection that works against the public interest."
Small companies have a particular concern, they "earn nearly 15 times the number of patents per employee as large enterprises":
"With individuals and smaller companies comprising a significant percentage of the invention that occurs around the world, it is important that we provide a forum to understand their concerns and issues if we want to improve the overall health of our patent systems," said John E. Kelly III, IBM senior vice president of Technology and Intellectual Property. "The goal of this initiative is to enable representatives of a broad segment of the invention community to voice new ideas for improving how they participate in the system and become part of the solution to the challenges our patent systems face."
IBM has also invited venture capitalists "and others who play a role in the evolution of smaller businesses, to join the forum in the second quarter of the year and share their views on the issues affecting their participation in the intellectual property marketplace".
People have been complaining for years that the patent system USA is broken. With its fondness for rushing to the law, companies there run the risk of being help do ransom by fly-by-nights whose dodgy relatives just happen to have a piece of paper that purports to patent the meaning of life. IBM isn't gunning for that lot, but they clearly don't do much for the reputation of a system that even one of the "winners" deems broken.
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