The beginning of the year is usually the time when businesses try to show how innovative they are by drawing attention to their position in the patent league tables. There have been some of those. Xerox, for example, issued a press release earlier this week telling us that it was awarded 584 new patents in 2007, “up 31 percent from 2005″ as the company said in its release, Xerox Fuels Innovation Engine with 584 New Patents in 2007.
We’ll leave others to explain the difference between Xerox’s numbers and those put out by IFI Patent Intelligence which, on the same day, “announced its annual compilation of the world’s top-ranked U.S. patent winners”. IFI’s league table shows that Xerox Corp was in 33rd place, along with Renesas Technology Corp of Japan.
As usual, IT businesses were the top of the pops. IBM headed the table, ahead of Samsung, Canon and Matsushita Intel and Microsoft, in that order.
IBM decided that it really didn’t need to boast about its filing system. After all, it has been number 1 for 15 years. Instead, it spiked the guns of the number crunchers by unveiling a patent giveaway.
On the same day as these other patently interesting announcements, IBM issued a press release on another patent story, a community effort to “help the environment, unleashing dozens of innovative, environmentally responsible patents to the public domain”.
The press release, Corporations Go Public With Eco-Friendly Patents, says that IBM has come together with Nokia, Pitney Bowes and Sony to support something they call the ” Eco-Patent Commons”.
The initiative, launched by IBM and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), comes with its own web site. This has a more detailed brochure, a PDF file, describing the initiative.
As you would expect of something involving legal bits of paper, this seems to be a complicated piece of work. Fortunately, there are some explanations of the motives of the participants and how the process will work.
It isn’t, it seems, just an attempt to give everyone involved a warm glow. Don’t expect IBM to hand out the family jewels. As the web site puts it “leading businesses may hold some patents that provide environmental benefit and do not represent an essential source of business advantage for them. Though these patents may provide nominal license or exclusivity potential for companies, they may provide greater value in a public commons.”
What can we expect? They talk off patented inventions that might deliver:
It seems that you don’t even have to be a megacorp to join in. “Contributing even one patent is sufficient for participation and can make a significant difference in helping to further sustainable development.” It is a good thing that patent offices around the world try to squelch the scientifically impossible. Don’t turn up, then, looking for perpetual motion machines.
