Canadian company Wi-LAN has filed patent lawsuits in a US District Court in Marshall, Texas against Motorola, Research in Motion, and UTStarCom for alleged infringement of the Ottawa patent-licensing company's intellectual property.

In the past this Texas court has been sympathetic to other patent holders by granting large damage awards against, guess who: Motorola, Research in Motion and UTStarCom. Wi-LAN's. Most recent suit claims infringement on their US patents for “MultiCode Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum” and “Method and apparatus for multiple access between transceivers in wireless communications using OFDM spread spectrum”. US Patent Laws can carry a whopping award of triple damages when a court finds willful infringement of a patent.

Wi-LAN was created in 1993 by Dr. Hatim Zaghloul with his co-invention of two leading edge wireless technologies: Wide-band Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (W-OFDM) and Multi-code Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (MC-DSSS). In 2004, Wi-LAN and Fujitsu were first-to-market WiMAX SOC chipsets. In 2006, Dr. Zaghloul left the day-to-day operations of Wi-LAN because of a battle over a proposed change in business direction.

Wi-LAN's press release from then said it restructured into an intellectual property (IP) licensing business, and sold iys products and engineering services businesses. Today its website says it is focused on licensing a portfolio of patents currently covering CDMA, DOCSIS, DSL, Wi-Fi, WiMAX and V-chip technologies.

In October 2007, Wi-LAN used the same infamous Texas court to file an omnibus suit against 22 other major companies for alleged violations of other Wi-LAN patents. The companies listed in those actions include computer manufacturers, chip makers and technology retailers, including Apple., Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Intel., Sony and retail chains such as Best Buy and Circuit City.

All of this high-powered and expensive legal maneuvering could be slowed to a crawl after last week's ruling by a US High Court saying no to <http://www.itexaminer.com/Business/tabid/79/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/605/Default.aspx> multiple patent royalties. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, said: 'For over 150 years the Supreme Court has applied the doctrine of patent exhaustion'. The legal doctrine says sale of an invention exhausts the patent-holder's right to control how the purchaser uses the patent. This stops the original patenter from perpetually collecting royalties for each buyer in the downstream supply chain. Therefore Wi-LAN will now have to go after only the original manufacturers and not their downstream retail sales outlets.

We are sure this sort of patent litigation is far from over in the WiMAX arena. X