The November 15 issue of Fortune has an article on Gerstner's attempts to turn around IBM. Part of the article (p. 120) has a brief account of what I think is a strange patent policy IBM used to have. It seems that IBM allowed various divisions to charge each other for their copyrights, names and other intellectual property. For example, the IBM group that sells PCs to schools had been told it would have to pay royalties to the IBM PC unit if it labeled its computers IBM. This intra-company policy has been halted. Greg Aharonian Internet Patent News Service