Category: Patents

The Supreme Court of the United States of America has unanimously rejected an application by MercExchange seeking a permanent injunction against eBay to restrain its conduct of online auction services allegedly in contravention of MercExchange’s patents. The case concerned the following facts: At issue are two patents filed for in 1995 by MercExchange, which began… Read more →

Rambus has succeeded in a patent claim against Hynix Semiconductor which was ordered to pay US$306.5 million in damages: A jury found that Hynix had infringed 10 of Rambus’ patents in a verdict announced on Monday in [the United States] district court in San Jose, [California]. The award covers compensation for Hynix sales in the… Read more →

The big news last month was that Research in Motion (‘RIM’) finally reached a settlement with NTP Inc (‘NTP’) in relation to RIM’s production and marketing of the BlackBerry push-email device, which NTP alleged infringed its patent. According to public reports of the settlement, RIM agreed to pay NTP some US$612.5m. (This is a little… Read more →

A federal judge rejected an attempt by units of Sony Corporation to overturn a $90.7 million jury verdict in a patent case that could affect a forthcoming generation of Sony videogame machines. At issue is what game makers call haptic technology, which is used to make game controllers vibrate in response to action on a… Read more →

The US federal government has taken a position against eBay in a patent dispute that threatens to shut down one of the online auction site’s popular shopping features. The Office of the Solicitor-General said in a brief filed with the Supreme Court that eBay wilfully infringed on patents held by MercExchange and should be enjoined… Read more →

In full-page advertisements in eight United States newspapers, Research in Motion (‘RIM’) yesterday called for urgent patent reforms. RIM, hitherto beleaguered by a long-running patent dispute with arch rival NTP Inc, recently settled the dispute for the princely sum of $612.5m. Chief Executive Officers Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie stated that RIM was pleased to… Read more →

‘GPL version 3, a draft of which will be released in January 2006, may contain a patent retaliation clause, Georg Greve, the president of the Free Software Foundation Europe, said Tuesday. Such a clause would mean that if a company accused a free-software product of infringing its software patents, that company would lose the right… Read more →

According to The Register, ‘Google has filed for a patent that covers advertisements in syndicated content’. Application No 20050165615 concerns a method for ‘Embedding advertisements in syndicated content’: ‘Syndicated material, eg, corresponding to a news feed, search results or web logs, are combined with the output of an automated ad server. An automated ad server… Read more →

Brookings Institute Scholar Ben Klemens has a nice little OpEd over on BI’s site about patent reform and why there is an important difference between software patents and other kinds of patents: However, the key distinction between a drug and a method for using a computer is that few of us own the equipment or… Read more →

Jim Stallings, vice-president of International Business Machines’ intellectual property and standards group, last week attacked the patent system as rewarding ‘bad behaviour’. He said it encourages the stockpiling and oppressive use of patents by undeserving corporations: ‘There has been a dramatic increase in the number of filings of patents recently, around the world, but particularly… Read more →