In its recent verdict in the most talked about case of LG Electronics v. Quanta (decided on June 9, 2008), the United States Supreme Court reaffirmed the doctrine of patent exhaustion. The case witnessed LG suing Quanta for using certain Intel chips incorporating patents owned by LGE. The point of contention was that inspite of the presence of a set of agreements (a license agreement and a master agreement) effectuated to provide notice to the third parties that license is only for using the Intel chips with other Intel or LG products, Quanta used the chips with other products in the computers. In this factual backdrop LG argued that patent exhaustion doesn’t apply to method patents while Quanta rebutted it saying that there is no such exception. In its detailed opinion the US Supreme Court held that the doctrine of patent exhaustion applies to method patents and since LG had authorized the sale of the components (chips) that substantially embody their patents, through the said agreements, the court stated that LG Electronics is barred from further asserting its patent rights with respect to those components.

Some of the leading companies have come together to form a trust called as the 'Allied Security Trust' with an objective of fighting Patent Trolls. Some of the members of the trust include, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Sun Microsystems and so on. A member can join the trust by paying 2, 50, 000 US Dollars and by placing five million dollars in an escrow account for buying patents. The trust will buy patents from inventors and companies with an objective of enabling the members to deal with the patented technology without liability.

(ICANN) Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers completed a policy development with the recommendation from its Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) to implement a process that allows introduction of New Top Level Domains i.e. to join the likes of .com or .org. in the meeting held in Paris on June 24th 2008.

The debate of the meeting amongst the giant owners like EBay, Yahoo, Nestle etc was as following:

• Anybody and everybody will register. Therefore to avoid this proper transparent guidelines should be framed and it is difficult to maintain that transparency with the existing DNS itself.
• It will lead to an increment of trademark infringement cases, Cyber squatting etc.
• Users would be confused by too many extensions.
• Whether to introduce new Generic Top level Domain Names or Country Code Domain Names.

The patent infringement litigation began when Dallas based i2 technologies filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas in September 2006 against Germany’s SAP and its U.S. subsidiary Newtown Square, SAP America Inc. i2 alleged infringement of its seven patents by SAP. The patented technologies covered software programs related to supply chain planning, electronic negotiation, collaboration, and available-to-promise product management. The companies agreed to settle the suit by cross licensing certain patents and dismissing all legal proceedings with prejudice. The settlement also included $83.3 million dollars payment by SAP to i2.