PUBLIC MARKS with tag brevet

Put any chemicals or processes over which it has intellectual property rights that are relevant to finding drugs for neglected diseases into a "patent pool", so they can be explored by other researchers.

With a 4,000-strong research team, Philips today owns 75,000 patents, 22,000 trademarks and 6,000 designs; its logo alone is valued at $5 billion. Each year, it files some 3,500 patents in the US and European patent offices. The revenue from licensing its technologies is also big.

I was asked "Why didn't you patent this yourself, if you developed it first?" My reply was "It only took me an hour to build; if I went down to the patent office after every hour of programming, I wouldn't get very much done."

Reading the patent, you realize it describes the quite common smartphone. It's a patent for a mobile phone with removable storage, an internet connection, a camera and the ability to download audio or video files. The patent holding firm who has the rights to this patent wasted no time at all. At 12:01am Tuesday morning, it filed three separate lawsuits against just about everyone you can think of, including Apple, Nokia, RIM, Sprint, AT&T, HP, Motorola, Helio, HTC, Sony Ericsson, UTStarcomm, Samsung and a bunch of others.

I couldn't agree more. In my 8 years in IBM Research, I first filed a patent an year or so after I joined I think. They have a whole system in place to reward you with cash and plaques on the wall based on how many patents you file and how many get issued. And the system makes it easy to do it- hired lawyers do most of the work and all the inventor does is fill a form and then edit the draft application done by the lawyers.

The search giant has just published their patent application (filed Feb. 28, 2006) for an SMS text message-payment system, ostensibly called “GPay,” that would facilitate private transactions between a merchant and a customer for goos and services.