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Originally Posted by KenWittlief
the real trick to being sucessful in the business world today is not covering your self with patents, but innovating faster than people can keep up with
if you come up with something new, then by the time it hits the market and other start to copy it, you have to be one or two generations ahead already
its gotten to where companys ignore patents and build what they want. 90% of all patents granted in the US prove to be worthless when challenged in court.
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That's because a patent only gets to court if the infringer believes it has a good chance of overturning the patent. The vast majority are settled out of court, with the infringer agreeing to pay license fees to the patent owner. IBM makes about $800 million dollars a year income from licensing fees only.
Patents are big business; a company can certainly build anything they want, but they can't sell it if someone else owns the rights without running into big legal fees. And if you do have a great innovation that will be a big success and make tons of money, do you really want to let anyone and their mother copy it and sell it their own version, when they didn't have to spend the time and money you spent to develop it? The only way to stop that is to own the patent rights to it. Why do you think a small company DEKA has almost 200 patents? Why do you think big corporations spend billions of dollars on patent each year? If it wasn't worth the time and money they wouldn't do it.
Name me one good invention (in the last century) that has made money for it's inventor that wasn't covered by a patent.