The study reveals that in 2006, the last year for which complete figures are available, IBM filed 3,651 patents, an average of ten per day. Hewlett Packard followed, filing 2115, with Toshiba and Microsoft rounding out the leader board.
Alongside reporting the number of patents filed, the study also rates them by quality, taking into account the company's previous patent activity and innovation. According to this rating, Microsoft actually tops the "patent power" index, despite filing less than half the number of IBM in 2006.
Engineers at many companies are now actively encouraged to file patents for any work in new areas, in order to avoid patent lawsuits and intellectual property disputes.
The OLPC Foundation has recently been on the end of such a dispute, with its laptop for developing nations temporarily banned from sale in Nigeria pending a legal decision on a patent infringement case.
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