Foreword to the First Edition

• Author: Emmett J. Murtha
• Pages: 11-13

FBETW02 12/15/2010 15:11:38 Page 11

Foreword to the

First Edition

As I write this, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has

just released its annual report of the top 10 private-sector organi-

zations receiving patents in the pr ior year. A comparison of the

listing for 2001 to those of past years reveals that the number of patents

required to rank first (as IBM has done since 1993) has more than tripled

in the past decade; the total number of U.S. patents issued annually

has gone up nearly 65 percent; and the proportion garnered by the top

10—all well-known electronics companies—has increased from 7.5 per-

cent to nearly 10 percent of all patents issued in 2001.

Fascinating statistics, but what’s behind them? Simply put, it’s

money. Dollars, yen, euros—billions of them, collected in the form of

royalties every year by companies and individuals (the late Jerome

Lemelson, for example) with valuable intellectual property, principally

patents. IBM alone will have received nearly $2 billion dur ing 2001

in IP-related payments, most of it cash, and nearly all of it pure profit.

Canon, Hitachi, Lucent, and many other top patent holders enjoy sig-

nificant returns on their R&D investments. And then there are the soft-

ware companies—Oracle, Microsoft, and, yes, IBM again—whose

products are intellectual property, protected globally by copyrights and

earning billions in sales.

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