Some august commentator recently wrote:
Evidently IBM decided in September of 2006 they would stress filing patents with “significant technical content”. They are going to “sharply reduce” the filling of bogus, aka business method patents. The company had no comment on their tens of thousands of patents filed and awarded before that date.
Further questions are emerging about whether this memo was ever actually circulated inside IBM. This latest patent was filed after IBM’s sanctimonious change in policy and drips with irony as it is a business method for extracting more revenue out of a patent portfolio. The company had no comment on how they reconcile a billion dollars of annual patent licensing revenue with their corporate embrace of the GPL.