In April, after four years of bitter and expensive patent litigation, the computer chip maker Intel agreed to pay Huntsville, AL-based Intergraph a whopping $300 million. It is one of the largest patent settlements in history. Don't feel bad if you missed the news, though. The press pretty much missed it, too, at least in part because word of the agreement was largely overshadowed by news of Intel's relatively upbeat (big news in these hard times) quarterly earnings report.

The press missed an important opportunity, however, because the case says a lot about the strength of our patent system. To be sure, I am frequently critical of deficiencies in this system, noting, for instance, that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office often grants unnecessarily broad or obvious patents. But even when I make these critiques, I am very mindful of the fact that, however flawed, our existing system often does do its job by protecting patent holders against those powerful players who might try to get around or steal away or somehow wrongfully employ their intellectual property. And that's really what this case is about.