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IBM Maintains Patent Lead, Moves To Increase Patent Quality

According to the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), IBM earned 2,941 patents last year, more than any other company. This is 13th consecutive year IBM has led the nation's patent production. Also, the company announced that is working with the USPTO, Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), members of the open source software community and academia to improve patent quality.

That initiative has three elements:

• Open Patent Review - In conjunction with the USPTO, this program will encourage various communities to review pending patent applications and provide feedback to the patent office on existing “prior art” that may not have been discovered by the applicant or examiner.
• Open Source Software as Prior Art - This project will establish open source software - with its billions of lines of publicly available computer source code contributed by thousands of programmers - as potential prior art against patent applications.
• Patent Quality Index - This

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