Artur Fischer from plastic materials (Polyamide) and is available in various shapes and sizes since 1958 (see Wall plug). Fischer held over 1100 patents and overtook Thomas Alva Edison, who held 1093 patents. Fischer also held 5867 trade rights and invented fischertechnik. Further inventions are (bone-)plugs for fixing bone fractures and one of Fischer’s most recent inventions is a gadget that makes it possible to hold and cut the top off an egg of any size. He got started on the problem when a hotel owner complained to him that his guests, on opening their boiled eggs for breakfast, always made a
Software patent Android by making such agreements-not-to-sue with Android vendors. In the late 1990s, Unisys claimed to have granted royalty free licenses to hundreds of not-for-profit organizations that used the patented LZW compression method and, by extension, the GIF image format. However, this did not include most software developers and Unisys were "barraged" by negative and "sometimes obscene" emails from software developers. Patenting software is widespread in the US. As of 2015, approximately 500,000 patents had issued in the 23 classes of patents covering "computer implemented inventions". (see table to the right). Many software companies cross license their patents to each other.