When the current patent law was passed in 1984, Congress couldn't have envisioned the creative thicket of patents with which drug firms could encircle their discoveries.
At the time, software was protected by copyright, which automatically comes with any creative work; software patents started to be allowed only in the 1980s, but were rarely sought.
San Francisco is the most exceptional large city, being rich (11th in income), creative (19th in patents) and fairly safe (181th in violent crime).
In a dispute illustrating the nature of claims, defenses, and counterclaims for patent infringement based on arguments of prior art and first to file, rival digital music player maker Creative Technology sued Apple in May 2006 for Apple's alleged infringement of Creative's Zen patent claiming Apple infringed Creative's patent for the menuing structures on an MP3 player.
Anybody who has ever talked to creative engineers, or patent lawyers, knows that a great many important ideas cannot be patented.
But once you turn down the hosannas on the music player, you are left with a company with no hammerlock on the technology (Creative holds the patent to the interface for MP3 players) and no unique operational advantages (such as Dell's made-to-order computers).
IBM ranked in the top three patent recipients in four of the 15 most creative states, and landed 4,186 patents nationwide the highest number of patents for any single company or individual for the 16th year in a row.
But today's advertising industry, once using focus groups of a few people to produce commercials for print, radio and TV, now calls its products "creative content," and uses patented algorithms and analytics to track global trends and behavior in order to predict and reshape the future.
For instance, they recommended that vaccine development should benefit from tax breaks, extension of patent terms, creative use of the orphan drug law, reduction in liability risks, public private partnerships, etc.
Researchers have for years devoted creative energy to figuring out patent "work-arounds" to avoid penalties from patent holders.
