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Against Monopoly
No, not me. Michael F. Martin, a patent attorney with Drinker Biddle. The March 2010 issue of Liberty (which also features a letters exchange regarding my December 2009 Liberty article, Intellectual Property and Libertarianism) features the following guest reflection by Mr. Martin:
Sane and sound “The hallmark of sanity is to remain firmly tethered to reality,” said the federal judge to the parties of a patent infringement litigation between a large Canadian computer company and a small, patent holding company (a.k.a. “patent troll”) after a jury had found the computer company liable for infringement. The computer company in question? Research In Motion, makers of the Blackberry. The case finally settled for $612.5 million.
That was March 2006. In May 2006 there followed the Supreme Court’s announcement of its decision in the case of eBay v. MercExchange. In eBay, the Supreme Court overturned the Federal Circuit rule that permanent injunctions should issue against patent infringers “absent exceptional circumstances.” Many large companies in the software industry, which tend to be defendants, have hoped that eBay would put an end to “patent trolls” and their own patent infringement liability. Indeed, since eBay only a handful of injunctions have issued to patent owners who do not practice their invention. “But,” wrote the Supreme Court in eBay, “traditional equitable principles do not permit such broad classifications.” And thus, just over three years later, on Dec. 22, 2009, the Federal Circuit upheld an injunction and award of $290 million in damages for patent infringement this time to a small Canadian startup, i4i Inc. The defendant was Microsoft Corporation, maker of Microsoft Word, which had incorporated into its software an XML editor patented by the startup.
The difference between the cases? Unlike the “patent trolls” in the earlier cases against RIM and …