Patent Lawsuits Catch-Up

A nice sum­mary of the 2006 e-comm litit­a­tion in the E-Commerce Times. Not sur­pris­ingly, they call 2006 the “Year of the Tech Pat­ent Law­suits”. An excerpt on one of my favourites:

For bet­ter or worse, pat­ent attor­neys can thank the NTP v. Research In Motion case for intro­du­cing the word ‘pat­ent troll’ into the gen­eral lex­icon and more fun­da­ment­ally, high­light­ing how easy it is for an upstart to chal­lenge an estab­lished com­pany. In short, it made pat­ent law sexy.

This and many other recent cases in with which an e-commerce pat­ent has been chal­lenged by a small com­pany has led to a steady call for reform by the soft­ware industry, he said.

“At every oppor­tun­ity, today’s soft­ware market-leaders have called for reduc­tions in the power of pat­ents, increases in the dif­fi­culty of obtain­ing pat­ents, and an enforce­ment bias toward com­pan­ies that prac­tice the patent.

Some see the pro­posed reforms as improv­ing ‘pat­ent qual­ity’ while oth­ers see them as a way to squeeze out upstart com­pet­it­ors,” he explained

Wow. I never thought I’d live to see the words “pat­ent law” and “sexy” used in the same sen­tence, much less using the lat­ter to describe the former. I’ve already rumin­ated about this topic pre­vi­ously so will keep this one short. Links to the art­icles below.

Part 1 Part 2

related:

1. pat­ent tides turning?
2. Hmmm.… inter­est­ing.… oops, might have just viol­ated a patent…
3. press neut­ral­ity and lawsuits
4. long live the revolu­tion! and lawsuits!
5. ibm with­draws pat­ent claim