We may have passed the peak of the “patent war” in the mobile industry, but the concept of patents as power is far from disappearing, since they continue to be a strong marker for how a company is breaking new ground in technology, and do sometimes help to safeguard an inventor’s or company’s original work — even if the legal enforcement around patents sometimes gets abused.
Patent research firm IFI Claims today published its annual report on how patent grants played out in the tech industry in the past year, and it’s a mixed picture as well.