Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!apple!baum
From: baum@Apple.COM (Allen J. Baum)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Split I and D caches and IBM lawyers
Message-ID: <15353@apple.Apple.COM>
Date: 10 Aug 88 17:59:18 GMT
References: <62370@sun.uucp> <15086@apple.Apple.COM> <62555@sun.uucp> <15129@apple.Apple.COM> <5536@ecsvax.uncecs.edu>
Reply-To: baum@apple.UUCP (Allen Baum)
Organization: Apple Computer, Inc.
Lines: 26

[]
>In article <5536@ecsvax.uncecs.edu> urjlew@ecsvax.uncecs.edu (Rostyk Lewyckyj) writes:
>
>Mr. Baum claims that biggness does not provide an advantage
>in patenting and patents. He also seems to feel that because
>IBM managed to get a patent on a precise implementation of
>a perhaps common art technique,  it must have been an
>innovation.

Well, I don't think it was common art, not in 1982.
>Big companies have staff lawyers to put together the paperwork
>to claim even small "innovations", and they do this almost as
>a matter of course.


IBM does not patent every innovation. Anyone who has seen the IBM Technical
Disclosure bulletin would understand that immediately. The Bulletin comes
out once or twice a month, is a couple of inches thick and full of the ideas
that they think are clever, but not worth their time to patent. They are 
published so someone else can't patent them, and force IBM to pay royalties.
When I worked for HP, we did not patent every little innovation. The engineers
would write a disclosure, and HP would go ahead with only those patents that
they thought were worth it. Lots of patents are too much trouble even for a
big company with lots of lawyers.

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