Drug companies have freedom under the Food and Drug Administration to ignore a rival's patents when starting research on competing medications, the Supreme Court ruled.
Big drug companies can start experimenting with potential therapies so long as they cannot feasibly be marketed until after a competitor's patent expires.
Integra LifeSciences sued for patent infringement after Merck set up animal trials for a cancer therapy using peptides that Integra says are patented until 2006.
Merck argued that it was entitled to the "head-start" research under an FDA exemption for studies "reasonably related" to a future drug application. The Supreme Court agreed, saying drug companies should have more leeway to investigate new drugs, not just generics.
Smaller firms such as Invitrogen say the $26 billion industry would be threatened if larger companies are given freedom to poke around their patented work without paying a licensing fee first.
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AOL gives it away: Free music and video will be the centerpiece of America Online's new strategy to boost advertising revenues by moving most of its content outside its well-manicured walled gardens.
Features that will remain available exclusively to AOL's diminishing base of subscribers, who pay up to $24 a month for an all-you-can-eat package, mostly involve software and support. Internal studies have shown that subscribers weren't staying on AOL simply for its content, so the company decided to make that available to a wider audience for free in hopes of gaining more online real estate to sell to advertisers, said James Bankoff, AOL's executive vice president for programming and products.
A test version of the new AOL.com portal, which Bankoff demonstrated Monday for The Associated Press, was expected to be available June 21. AOL plans a formal launch next month.
Visitors will be able to set the portal's home page to a Video Hub mode featuring video links from AOL, Time Warner sister companies and elsewhere on the internet. AOL also is pushing an AOL Music On Demand video channel and is developing an American Idol-like web contest carrying as its prize a recording contract. On-demand channels featuring comedy, celebrity news and self-help are also in the works.
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A slew of phones: Nokia launched seven new handsets with increasingly accurate digital cameras and fast downloads of data and games from the internet.
Five of the models in the 6000 series -- dubbed "simple pleasures" because of their easy-to-use qualities -- come with estimated price tags of $170 to $460 at the top of the range. Prices were not given for two more-basic new models in the Nokia 2000 series.
Some of the new handsets, which use 3G technology that allows increasingly faster connections to the internet, also have video-sharing properties, FM radio and support for digital sound formats like the popular MP3.
All seven models will be available in the second half of this year, Nokia said.
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Idle time: Volvo and Norwegian oil and gas company Statoil are starting a joint venture to make fuel-cell technology aimed at cutting emissions from idling engines.
The new venture, Powercell, will use fuel-cell technology to build small electricity generators that can be mounted in trucks and other vehicles. Vehicles using the fuel-cell generator would not have to run their engines on idle to generate power.
The companies said the new generator could be useful in North America, where truck drivers often sleep in their vehicles and run idle to generate power for air conditioning and other systems.
The fuel cell would be powered by hydrogen gas produced from diesel oil carried by the vehicle and could reduce carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles by 20 to 30 tons per year.
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Wi-Fi by the numbers: T-Mobile disclosed user statistics from its Wi-Fi business for the first time, reporting that 450,000 customers have paid to access wireless internet in the past three months.
T-Mobile Hotspot users are staying online an average of 64 minutes per login in 2005, up from 45 minutes last year and 23 minutes in 2003. The total number of logins has totaled 3 million in the past three months, versus about 8 million in all of 2004.
The Wi-Fi service is a key business for T-Mobile, which unlike many of its mobile phone rivals is not upgrading its cellular network to deliver high-speed internet access in addition to phone service.
T-Mobile disclosed the user statistics as it announced an expansion in the number of locations where customers can access the service in the United States and overseas. Combined, there will now be 5,700 U.S. locations and 6,500 in Europe.
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Compiled by David Cohn. AP and Reuters contributed to this report.
