IP giveaway makes IBM patently green

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