IBM, which has been awarded more patents than any other company in each of the past 12 years, says it will donate 500 patents to open source users and developers. The move represents a challenge to other patent-holders to unlock technologies that might impede innovation, according to an eWeek article.

The 500 donated IBM patents include:

• Unspecified –18
• Interfacing — 9
• Storage Management — 37
• Multi-processing — 14
• Data processing programming — 49
• Human interfacing — 66
• Database and data handling — 66
• Image processing and video technology — 34
• Human language processing — 22
• Compression, encryption, and access control — 20
  (including “system for performing data compression based on the Liu-Zempel algorithm”)
• Software development and object technology — 51
• Internet, e-commerce, and industry-specific — 25
• Networking and network management — 52
• Miscellaneous — 37

A list of donated patents by publication number and title is available here. For further information on a given patent, try using the “advanced search” at the the US Patent Office Website (Hint: remove the “US” or other alphabetical prefix, and prepend “pn/” to your search. For example: “pn/[patent-number]”).

More details about the donation are available at eWeek:

 
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