Patents are rapidly rising in pre-eminence as we enter a period where large companies are much more nimble in buying or building new innovations than previously, avoiding the mistakes of IBM and DEC in the PC era of the early '80s. Given that the innovator can be copied faster than they can establish a market position, IP becomes the critical competitive barrier. InterTrust's success so far in their dispute suggests its victory or settlement with Microsoft is the next shoe to fall; at the moment the buzz is around Microsoft's recent loss to Eolas. As Corante reports from an InfoWorld article
"Microsoft's loss to Eolas is sending a message to rest of the tech industry. Tech and legal experts are saying the ruling could affect a wide range of products that interact with Web browsers or services that rely on customer interaction through Web pages. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is examining the impact of the ruling, but it could take months. Douglas Kline, chairman of the patent and intellectual property group at Boston law firm Testa, Hurwitz & Thiebeault, says it may be difficult for others to prove prior art. "Microsoft would know better than anybody what they were working on when the patent was filed. To the extent they did exhibit (prior art), the jury disagreed. So if Microsoft couldn't prove that their own activity didn't render a patent invalid, it could be difficult for anyone else to prove it."