Patent Phishing

  Last week the Apex court's ruling  in the Enercon vs Yogesh Mehra case, that a patent opponent cannot take multiple shots at challenging the same patent  but must choose between the various options spelt out in India’s Patent Act, has gone unnoticed. The ruling  is a welcome deterrent on multiple port patent litigation  by zealous patent lawyers.The subject case had involved hard core  designs for Wind Power equipment and Systems, which  made it perhaps  more conducive to legal examination than say those pertaining to software domains where patents are   litigated because of undefined boundaries, vague language  and unclear scope  . Much earlier in the wake of the legal shift from a focus on what the patentee actually built, towards  the  concept of " boundaries of invention ",  lawyers made out  claims in broad functional terms and sought a lien to own rights, not to a particular machine or even to a particular  method of  achieving a goal, but to the goal itself !.This  ill conceived development led to costly  defensive patenting ie,acquiring patents mainly to pre-empt the risk of litigation .Technology companies in particular,  spent fortunes  on building defenses .Google bought Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion ,mostly for its patents. An Apple-Microsoft-Nokia consortium bought Nortel’s patent portfolio for $4.5 billion.The  current SC ruling hopefully  helps tilt the balance back ,in favour of innovation and to discourage " Patent Phishing