Garmin sues TomTom on patent infringement

In what has become an inevitable sign of the times, yet another market has reached that all important threshold whereby the major players begin suing one another. This time the market is GPS and the players are US-based Garmin suing rival Dutch outfit TomTom. They've been slugging it out in Europe for years with TomTom going on the offensive recently in the US with a blitz of TeeVee ads. Garmin is calling for unspecified financial damages in their claim that TomTom is illegally using five US-patented Garmin technologies designed to "calculate which streets are important enough to a driver’s route to be displayed." Analysts have chimed-in calling this potentially bad news for TomTom who would have to stop marketing their products in the US should they lose the case not to mention the resources tied up in fighting this claim. Well, at least this time the company protecting its patents actually manufactures goods unlike some other high-profile cases we likes to follow.