Congress has been debating various patent reform bills for years, but observers say the latest proposals also have a good shot at passing in the Senate, which has a similar bipartisan bill. Although the Bush adminstration said yesterday that it doesn't support some provisions in the House bill—which was approved by a vote of 225 to 175—it favors patent reform overall and is expected to get onboard.

Among the proposals in the House's Patent Reform Act of 2007 are changes to how damages are calculated, so that awards are based on the "fair share" of a patent's contribution to a product. So, for example, in an infringement case related to the patent for a technology embedded in the sound card of a laptop computer with thousands of components, the damage award would be based on the value that the sound card contributes to the laptop, not the value of the whole laptop.

Among the supporters of the House bill are established tech vendors, which hope it will deter lawsuits they say have questionable merit and motive. "The way the system is set up today makes it so inviting for parties to take a shot [by filing a patent suit] and then pressure a company to settle," says a spokesman for the Coalition for Patent Fairness, whose members include Microsoft and Dell as well as Countrywide Financial, Chevron, and St. Jude Medical.

But opponents, which include pharmaceutical companies, say the recalculation of damages, as well as some of the other proposals, could stifle innovation by watering down patent protection.

One proposal would shift patent search work done by government examiners to applicants, requiring them to submit a search report. The 5,000-member Patent Office Professionals Association says such work should remain mostly a government function.

The House approval comes amid a string of tech patent-infringement suits. Network Appliance earlier this week filed suit against Sun Microsystems, alleging that Sun's ZFS storage virtualization technology infringes on patents related to its WAFL file system. NetApp alleges that Sun is exacerbating the damage by distributing the ZFS technology to third parties, especially as open source code.

Last week, intellectual property licensing firm Polaris IP filed suits against Amazon.com, AOL, Google, Yahoo, and others, claiming they are violating Polaris' automatic message routing patent. The lawsuit seeks an injunction against those companies, but a more likely scenario is a payday for the plaintiff.

"It looks like Polaris IP is in the business of licensing patent rights and has no desire to enforce its requested injunction," says Dennis Crouch, associate professor of law at the University of Missouri School of Law and the author of the law blog Patently-O, in an e-mail. "I expect that Polaris IP will be willing to settle these cases for what it believes is a reasonable six- or seven-digit figure."

Tech-related patent suits aren't just a tech or Web company issue. This week, Taurus IP, a Wisconsin intellectual property firm, filed suit against several automotive and apparel companies, claiming that their Web sites contain functions that let customers configure orders using technology that infringes on Taurus patents. Defendants in that suit include Hyundai Motors, Michelin, Polo Ralph Lauren, Puma, and Reebok.