Intergraph Corp’s suit against Intel Corp may be split into separate patent and anti-trust sections, a judge said at a pretrial hearing in Birmingham, Alabama said last Saturday.
Federal judge Edwin Nelson said the patent dispute portion of the trial might need to be decided in advance of the main trial, currently due to begin on February 14, 2000. Intergraph has accused Intel of infringing patents it holds relating to the now defunct Clipper RISC chip. Intel claims its rights were covered under an existing agreement with National Semiconductor Corp, which briefly owned the Clipper technology. The antitrust allegations center around Intel’s alleged bullying tactics of withholding technical information in order to force Intergraph into entering into a cross-licensing agreement.
Intergraph attorneys argued that the company was already being harmed by delays in the trial, and that a separate patent action would hold back the proceedings even further.
