It's no news flash that the economy has been struggling for over a year, with the high-tech sector taking the biggest beating. But you'd never know it by looking at patent activity. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office received a record flood of 344,717 patent applications in 2001, as companies worldwide beefed up their patent portfolios. The intellectual-property principle for the post-dot-com world: patent or perish.

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