Re: [Patents] Re: IBM, Microsoft, BEA Snub W3C

[Carsten Svaneborg <svanebor@mpip-mainz.mpg.de>]

Arrgh. Repost to right place.

On Thursday 01 May 2003 21:44, Gregory Aharonian wrote:
> They probably have made more off their software patents
> than everyone else together.

 ``You get value from patents in two ways,'' says Roger Smith,
IBM Assistant General Counsel, intellectual property law. ``Through
fees, and through licensing negotiations that give IBM access to
other patents. ``The IBM patent portfolio gains us the freedom to
do what we need to do through cross-licensing---it gives us access
to the inventions of others that are the key to rapid innovation.
Access is far more valuable to IBM than the fees it receives from
its 9,000 active patents. There's no direct calculation of this value,
but it's many times larger than the fee income, perhaps an order
of magnitude larger.''    (Think magazine, issue #5, 1990.)


I.e. IBM needs to take out patents to cancel the patent
monopolies on inventions (and software) granted to other
companies, in order to enable IBM to improve and integrate
these innovations. 

So are patents and innovation cause and effect, effect
and cause, or rather an egg and hen problem? seen from
the perspective of large or small companies.

See "Navigating the Patent Thicket: Cross Licences,
Patent Pools, and Standard-Setting" C. Shapiro, 2001
http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/thicket.pdf

-- 
  Mvh. Carsten Svaneborg