These days there are 100s of messages about Apple requesting new patents, but what most people dont know is that Apple is actually pretty small as a patent owner, compared to some other well known companies. In the graphic above (for full version click here), you can see that Apple is one of the small “spikes”. They just own around 1000 patents, compared to other big companies such as IBM “10.000+”, Nokia “11.500+” and Samsung “11.800+” thats a small amound.

Chetan Sharma created this graphic based on data released by the American patent organisation USPTO and European Patent Office.

Source (GigaOm)