Standards have slipped and in America the number of lawsuits over contested patents has shot up (see chart).
Meanwhile, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office had been working independently to review the case and issued preliminary rejections for the contested patents.
Earlier this month, RIM Co-Chief Executive James L. Balsillie James L. Balsillie said the company had developed a workaround for the service that would not violate any contested patents.
RIM Co-CEO Jim Balsillie Jim Balsillie says the company has developed a workaround for the service that would not violate any contested patents.
The patent being contested – U.S. Patent Number 6,247,130, titled "Distribution of musical products by a website vendor over the Internet" – would essentially prevent all these companies from using any type of online store environment which allows them to provide song previews, a shopping cart or even a music player.
Vonage argued that it did not use Sprint's inventions, and contested the patents' validity, saying they should not have been issued.
Two weeks later, Microsoft made peace again, this time with InterTrust Technologies, another company that had been at war with Microsoft over contested technology patents.Microsoft is not only settling law suits, but turning companies that it has not even offended into new allies.
The University of California Berkeley professor and founder of biotech startup Caribou Bioscience was until recently embroiled in a hotly contested two-year patent battle with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard over key portions of the technology, namely the ability to edit living cells.
The Symbol case addresses a different but highly contested issue dealing with patents that are not issued until years after their filing, after others have developed marketable products.
Throughout de Forest's lifetime, the originality of his more important inventions was hotly contested by both scientists and patent attorneys.
