Firestar sued Red Hat for violation of its US patent, which relates to a method for interfacing an object-oriented software application with a relational database to facilitate access to the relational database. Firestar alleged that the Hibernate package distributed by Red Hat violates its patent. Red Hat has now settled the patent suit with Firestar and Data-Tern, the assignee of the patent. Under the settlement all products of Red Hat will not be liable for violation of Firestar and Data-Tern's patents. Other details of the settlement have not been disclosed.

A patent dispute began in March 2007, when the reigning No. 1 PC maker HP filed a suit against Taiwanese based computer maker Acer, for infringing on five patents owned by HP, in the U.S. District Court of Wisconsin. In April 2007, HP also filed a complaint to the U.S. International Trade Commission for infringement of four more patents by Acer. The patents in dispute covered technologies such as power management in notebooks, read/write optical drives, digital bus arrangement, thermal management and video control. The purpose of the suits was to stop Acer from importing and selling its PCs in the U.S. In July 2007, Acer responded by denying the allegations and by filing a counter-claim of infringement of a patent owned by Acer relating to antenna and DVD-ROM head technology. Finally the legal battle ended with a settlement between both the parties. All the claims in the suits and investigations were resolved. However the terms of the settlement were kept confidential.

In its recent verdict in the most talked about case of LG Electronics v. Quanta (decided on June 9, 2008), the United States Supreme Court reaffirmed the doctrine of patent exhaustion. The case witnessed LG suing Quanta for using certain Intel chips incorporating patents owned by LGE. The point of contention was that inspite of the presence of a set of agreements (a license agreement and a master agreement) effectuated to provide notice to the third parties that license is only for using the Intel chips with other Intel or LG products, Quanta used the chips with other products in the computers. In this factual backdrop LG argued that patent exhaustion doesn’t apply to method patents while Quanta rebutted it saying that there is no such exception. In its detailed opinion the US Supreme Court held that the doctrine of patent exhaustion applies to method patents and since LG had authorized the sale of the components (chips) that substantially embody their patents, through the said agreements, the court stated that LG Electronics is barred from further asserting its patent rights with respect to those components.