Business Week 5-16 The war between Big Tech and the often-irksome holders of patents made it all the way to the Supreme Court in the case of eBay Inc. et al v. MercExchange LLC. But anyone hoping that the high court would hand down a victory for one side or the other came away disappointed on May 15.

Make no mistake -- eBay was granted a reprieve. But the narrowly tailored and succinct, five-page opinion offered up no big winners, and no big losers, in a patent case that signifies a deep and long-simmering philosophical split in intellectual-property circles. At issue is the role of so-called patent trolls -- a derisive term applied to scrappy entrepreneurs who amass patents with the sole intent of extracting large licensing fees from alleged infringers, sometimes threatening court injunctions to help seal the deal.

Because the high court declined to take a side in the debate, choosing instead to hew to a narrow interpretation of existing statute, ``both sides will find something to crow about in this opinion,`` says Sharon Barner, chair of the intellectual-property department at Foley & Lardner. And the opinion likely will take the wind out of efforts in Congress to reform a system that`s granting patents on processes that are already in wide use or techniques so simplistic that avoiding infringement is nearly impossible

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