Samsung ranked top filer of patents in Europe

3/7/2013 12:47 PM EST

The question is, how many patents find their way into real products. And how many disappear in a drawer?

3/7/2013 11:33 PM EST

Does filing patents mean granted patents?

@Olaf: from a tech giant's perspective (with lots and lots of money), keeping patents in their drawer is a perfectly planned defensive strategy though.

3/8/2013 12:15 AM EST

why Apple,Google,Microsoft are not on the list? They dont think european market big enough?

And whats up with RIM/Sharp and some near bankruptcy companies on the list? They should focus on their products first before piling up patents.

ZTE/Huawei continues on with the mission of world dominion

3/8/2013 2:52 AM EST

STMICROELECTRONICS is not present in the list...very bad sign

3/10/2013 3:12 AM EDT

Filing a patent application doesn't mean that a patent will be granted.
Having a patent granted doesn't mean that it has any value (patents often describe very narrow, specific, items, so narrow in fact that the patent is irrelevant.)
Just because the USPTO grants a patent doesn't mean that the invention hasn't been patented before by someone else - the USPTO are expert at not finding pior art, and often grant patents for inventions patented earlier (sometimes decades earlier). All this I tell from experience.

3/12/2013 9:21 PM EDT

I'd also be interested in the impact of the patents. There are companies that file many patents that are tiny variations on the same concept (often even with the same title). Unfortunately the statistics on patents issued and patents cited take years to develop and therefore don't satisfy our desire for immediate news. Furthermore, when the statistics do become available, they represent the impact of work that was done years earlier.