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• Blowing Smoke: A lawsuit over tobacco patents goes to the jury  

There are dozens of lawyers attached to the court case Star Scientific v.. R.J. Reynolds tobacco company, and it is possible that all of them are packed into courtroom 5C at the Baltimore federal courthouse on Monday, June 15. . . .

The attraction of the day is a patent-infringement lawsuit brought by Star, a small, Virginia-based tobacco company, against Reynolds, one of the giants of the industry.

"It's not the patent law that makes the case interesting, though," says Lawrence Sung, the director of the University of Maryland Law School's Intellectual Property Law Program. "It's the technology."

Star claims that Reynolds has infringed on a process developed by Star inventor Jonnie Williams, which reduces the amounts of harmful nitrosamines in cured tobacco. Reynolds denies this, and further alleges that Star's patents should never have been granted in the first place. The Wall Street Journal has reported that the U.S. Patent Office is re-examining Star's patents, but a request by Reynolds to stay the trial until that examination was complete was denied. . . .

"I don't even want to think about the number of witnesses," Garbis tells the jury. "There were enough witnesses. . . . I'm sure somewhere in this case, they've agreed on something. I have a hard time remembering what it is."

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