A Heated Year For Intellectual Property

It was another year of contentious disputes among patent holders. In the most eye-popping case to reach the light of day, a patent dispute over ruthenium-based olefin metathesis catalysts emerged in November. The case pits the discoveries of Nobel Prize winner Robert H. Grubbs of California Institute of Technology against Technical University of Munich president and inorganic chemist Wolfgang A. Herrmann.

The dispute began in 2009 when Evonik Industries, the owner of Herrmann’s patents, sued Materia, which had licensed Grubbs’s olefin metathesis patents, for infringing Herrmann’s patents. Materia disputed Evonik’s claims and charged that Evonik infringed its patents. The case is now wending its way through U.S. federal court.

Earlier in the year, W.R. Grace sued Teledyne Technologies for infringing four patents covering flash chromatography, a quick chemical purification process widely used in pharmaceutical research. Akzo­Nobel sued rival Huntsman Corp., claiming that Huntsman and a former Akzo chemist misappropriated Akzo’s trade secrets to patent a class of chemicals that make the herbicide glyphosate more effective.

Patent suits sometimes do end with all parties in agreement. Monsanto and DuPont decided to bury the hatchet and end a series of lawsuits over genetically modified seeds. DuPont agreed to pay at least $1.75 billion in royalties through 2030 for using Monsanto technology in new soybean products. For its part, Monsanto gained the right to use disease resistance and corn defoliation technology from DuPont.

Employees continued to get into tangles over the handling of employers’ trade secrets. Tung Pham, a former senior scientist at Heraeus, pleaded guilty in a U.S. court to theft of trade secrets and wire fraud. Pham admitted to downloading hundreds of trade secrets related to lead-free solar-cell metallization pastes from Heraeus’s computers.