Patent wars are not a new phenomenon. In the
Wright brothers patent war, the
Wright brothers, attributed with the invention of the
airplane, sought to prevent competitors from manufacturing airplanes through litigation, stifling the development of the American airline industry.
Alexander Graham Bell, credited with inventing the telephone, was dragged into a patent war against his rivals, which involved, in just 11 years, 600 lawsuits. The occurrence of patent wars has been shaped by the
digital age, as the rapid pace of innovation makes much of the patent system obsolete. In the 1980s, technology corporations in the United States and Japan engaged in a patent war, creating a scenario where companies were forced to "fight patent with patent." This bilateral patent war, partly exaggerated by the media, subsided by the mid 1990s. Exacerbating the frequency of patent wars was the advent of
patent trolling. The term "patent troll" was coined in the 1990s by the employees of
Intel and popularized by Intel's
Peter Detkin. According to Detkin, Intel was "sued for libel for the use of the term 'patent extortionists' so I came up with 'patent trolls...a patent troll is somebody who tries to make a lot of money off a patent that they are not practicing and have no intention of practicing and in most cases never practiced." During the 1990s, federal courts began reversing earlier decisions made by the patent office that restricted the patenting of software. In 1999, a patent for "one-click ordering technology" led to a patent war between
Amazon.com and
Barnes & Noble. In 2004, Sony and Kodak engaged in a patent war over digital cameras, a dispute which lasted until 2007. The current
smartphone wars started in the late 2000s. According to
PC Magazine, Apple brought the patent wars to the smartphone market by its desire to "go thermonuclear war" on Google's competing
Android operating system for mobile devices. This triggered a "war" between major technology companies in the mobile market. ==Effects and response==