86 TOBACCO BUSINESS | JULY / AUGUST | 22 When you go to buy something in a store, do you like having a choice in what you’re shopping for? Of course you do—because having a choice means that companies must improve their respective products to make them appealing to consumers. This competition is at the core of capitalism and serves as a major driver of innovation and business in America. The concept of patent wars is nothing new in America. Many different businesses and corporations have often worked hard to secure a patent for the purpose of using it in litigation later as either an offensive or defensive business move. The Wright brothers, who are credited as being the inventors of the airplane, used their patents to keep others from building their own airplanes. Alexander Graham Bell, credited in history books for inventing the telephone, was involved in 600 different lawsuits over the span of 11 years over patent infringement claims, according to Anton A. Huurdeman’s “The Worldwide History of Telecommunications.” Apple famously went to “war” with Google with its own patent infringement claims, accusing the company’s Android operating system designed for mobile devices of infringing upon Apple’s mobile operating system and graphical user interface patents. Sony and Kodak went after one another in 2004 in a patent war waged over digital phones that wasn’t resolved until 2007. Now the patent wars have come to the tobacco industry. The fight over patents has been accelerated in recent years by the rise of technology in business. In the case of the tobacco industry, the steady decline of smoking year after year and the desire to create reducedrisk alternatives to combustible cigarettes has led many tobacco manufacturers to look for other opportunities in the marketplace. In recent years, the tobacco industry has seen a wave of next-generation products being introduced, from e-cigarettes to tobacco-free oral nicotine products and heat-not-burn products. These products are not like their predecessors and have often been developed and brought to the market with an accompanying patent. Those patents are now taking center stage in contentious court cases pitting different tobacco businesses against one another as the competition for market dominance heats up (no pun intended). Yesterday’s Wars One of the biggest patent infringement cases to hit the tobacco industry, which involved Imperial Tobacco, Altria Group and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., was over an e-cigarette patent created by Hon Lik. After losing his father to lung cancer, Hon Lik set out to create a cigarette product that produced vapor instead of smoke. He patented his invention in 2003 and presented it to the company he worked for, Golden Dragon Holdings. Impressed by what would come to be known as the e-cigarette, they changed the company name to Ruyan, a word that translates to “like smoke” in Chinese. W PATENTWARS Tobacco businesses are taking a cue from Silicon Valley and Big Tech by using patents to eliminate competition and dominate categories, leaving consumers with few alternatives to traditional tobacco products. Photography courtesy of Kretek International and Adobe Stock By Antoine D. Reid OTHER TOBACCO PRODUCTS
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgzMDM=