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When a corporation stakes its reputation on the competitive value of its patent portfolio, it can't afford to watch that portfolio go down in flames. Although the novelty of most any patented technological concept perhaps warrants some re-examination, three patents assigned to memory maker Rambus were recently invalidated by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, in a dispute with graphics device maker Nvidia over whether the act of rendering functionality on a single chip is a novel idea or just an obvious improvement.

This morning, both companies announced they've settled all disputes over the remaining, still-valid Rambus patents, with Nvidia being granted a five-year license to the formerly disputed technology. But this Nvidia win will have implications throughout the industry, as the competitive value of nearly all technologies integrated into a single circuit, may have just decreased.

U.S. Patent # 6,591,353, "Protocol for Communication with Dynamic Memory," tends to refer to a "memory device." The innovation with respect to this device appeared to be the introduction of a synchronous clock. That way, time-multiplexed transfers could take place in a regulated fashion.

But as USPTO documents published today show, the appeals judges found that two existing patents cited by Nvidia qualify as prior art, and moreover, that the teachings demonstrated by those older patents would be inspiration enough for a skilled artisan to apply the teachings to improving synchronous memory the way Nvidia appears to have done.

Among a handful of patents transferred last December 31 from IBM's portfolio to that of Google, as first discovered by Bill Slawski of SEO By the Sea, is a system for processing text compiled by users of social networks, and ascertaining their common interests. We've already seen the rise of tools such as Radian6 for ascertaining social net users' individual interests; this new technology, which received a U.S. patent only one year ago, would judge what concepts they share with one another.

The goal of this technology, as IBM originally stated, is to literally to filter out irrelevant links to articles that may not pertain to users' search intentions. What we don't know yet is whether Google intends to use this technology, or simply keep others from using it first.

Last week IBM announced that it has taken chemical data from various patents and made this information available to researchers online. It is just the latest in an ever widening of publically available information concerning patents and intellectual property. But online patent access has had an interesting history, and even though it dates to the early days of the Web, it was a difficult path and an interesting story in public access to information.

In collaboration with Bristol-Myers Squibb, DuPont and Pfizer, IBM is providing a database of more than 2.4 million chemical compounds extracted from about 4.7 million patents and 11 million biomedical journal abstracts from 1976 to 2000. IBM Research developed it in collaboration with these private companies over the past six years. It includes patents from a variety of sources outside of the US. The data will be incorporated into the PubChem archive at the National Center for Biotechnology Information of the National Institutes of Health.

I am not a lawyer, and I don't wish to ever become one (on TV or in real life), much to the disappointment of my mother who once wished that would become my chosen profession. I was reminded of this recently when I reviewed an article that Scott Fulton wrote last month for ReadWriteEnterprise here about the recent changes in our patent law system. It seems we are headed down the wrong path, making it harder for entrepreneurs to obtain and contest patents.

"Our technology is used in every mobile phone," reads a leaderboard-style ad on the home page of InterDigital, a wireless technology company that holds some 8,800 critical patents. An independent assessment last April of the relative value of communications companies' patent portfolios by equity market analysis firm Ocean Tomo LLC rated the key 4G and 3G patents held by InterDigital (of which there are about 20) as about 4% more valuable, and 6% more relevant to significant communications platforms, than Nortel's 20 key patents.

Financial analysts last week had perceived an upcoming InterDigital patent auction as a key opportunity for Google to pull itself back to par after having lost both its bids for the Nortel and Novell portfolios. But that was before last Monday's announcement of Google's intent to acquire Motorola Mobility (MMI).

The most open thing going on in the Android realm today may be warfare. Today's announcement of Google's intent to acquire Motorola Mobility, the producer of many Android phones and a prominent contributor to the Droid brand, points to a new and severely altered landscape for mobile apps where absolutely every platform is controlled by a principal corporate entity that is directly partnered with, owns, or is a phone maker.

"Google has drawn some lines in the sand by essentially becoming a competitor to OEMs with whom it has previously aligned as a partner," says Yahoo Canada technology analyst Carmi Levy. "If you're in the corner office of Samsung or HTC, your world just became a lot more complex. They need to consider whether they want to continue contributing to the growth of what is now going to be their largest competitor."

In a surprisingly candid move, Google Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond published an opinionated post on the company's official blog contending that its Android mobile operating system is under "attack" from a "hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents."

Drummond's post is in reference to last week's sale of Nortel's patent portfolio to a consortium of Google's competitors. The purchase of these patents threatens Android's dominant share of the smartphone OS market by making the operating system more expensive for phone manufacturers to license.

Ten days after patent holder Lodsys sent out threatening letters to iOS developers, claiming infringement and demanding licensing fees, Apple sent its lawyers to defend against the attack. According to Apple's legal team, the license it holds on Lodsys' in-app payments technology also extends to its developer community.

So what did Lodsys do next? It went after an Android developer, it appears.

Mike Lee, a Mac developer and former iOS developer with major contributions to Tap Tap Revenge, Obama '08 and Apple's own retail application, has suggested a radical way to fight back against the patent firms targeting mobile application developers with claims of infringement. It's time for an API boycott, he says.

Lee calls the current patent trolling, where firms such as Lodsys and others are threatening to sue developers who don't license patents for technology developments like in-app purchasing buttons and the use of forms, an "untenable situation" for developers. "There is no move we can make that will result in our ultimate survival. Either we pay Lodsys and usher in a new era of extortion, or we refuse to pay and are sued out of business."

But there's a third option, he offers. Developers can put pressure on Apple by boycotting the use of any API that comes under fire from these patent holders.