Lucent-Alcatel filed patent infringement suits against Microsoft's customers Dell and Gateway Computer Corp. for infringing on 15 patented technologies related to MP3 encoding and decoding. Lucent-Alcatel alleged that its patented technologies were used by Microsoft in its Windows Media Player. The jury ordered Microsoft to pay 1.5 billion dollars as damages for patent infringement to Lucent-Alcatel.

Mashelkar Committee was set up in April 2005 to look into the TRIPs compatibility of the Patent Law. The focus was on the limitation of the grant of patents for pharmaceutical substances to new chemical entities or new medical entities involving one or more inventive steps only and exclusion of micro organisms from patenting. The final Report was submitted in December 2006. The Report has now been withdrawn on the grounds of technical inaccuracy and plagiarism because certain concluding lines in the Report were taken verbatim from a paper written by Shamnad Basheer, a doctoral student and an Associate at the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre, University of Oxford.