Legal Trends (Part II): Global Technology and Local Patent

The Internet is generally perceived as an American invention, and this is largely true. The global interconnection of computers using shared protocols was based on the cold war inspired ARPANET, developed by the U.S.’s Advanced Research Projects Agency in the 1960's. But as ARPANET evolved from a Department of Defense-oriented system to a research-oriented system, non-US research interests began to take a more active role in the development of the Internet’s protocols and features. The Worldwide Web and the first web browsers, for example, were developed at the CERN European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva Switzerland. Now, the Internet is truly global, both in its reach and in its continuing development.\ud \ud As outlined in last month’s Legal Trends: Patenting the Internet article, a very large number of the technologies and processes that underlie the Internet are protected by patents. Given a worldwide Internet, these patented processes control functions that operate both inside and outside U.S. borders. In a similar vein, there are a large number of Internet patents that were awarded outside the U.S. that impact Internet functions within the U.S. This article addresses the challenges presented by these cross-border patents.\u