EBay’s Supreme Court bid backed
Published January 31st, 2006
Research In Motion Ltd. and Yahoo! Inc. are supporting eBay Inc.’s U.S. Supreme Court bid to make it harder to force companies that infringe patents to change their products to avoid future violationsEBay, the world’s biggest Internet auction house, is appealing a lower court ruling that said trial judges, after finding a violation of patent rights, almost always should issue an order barring future infringements. EBay is trying to avoid a shutdown of its fixed-price sales service, which accounts for almost one-third of the value of items sold on eBay.EBay and its supporters say the appeals court decision gives other companies an incentive to buy patents and use the threat of a shutdown order to force payments from businesses that make products covered by the patent. Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry e-mail pager, faces a possible court order barring its service in the United States because of a court finding that it infringed another company’s patent.Issuing such orders lets some patent owners “extort settlements that vastly exceed the true economic value of their patents and impose enormous social costs, particularly in the computer and Internet industries,” Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., wrote in court papers filed last week. Yahoo is the owner of the most-visited Internet site.
