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RIM Loses NTP Case, To Pay $53 Million
theodp writes "A judge has ruled in favor of holding company NTP in its patent-infringement case against BlackBerry maker Research In Motion, awarding monetary damages and fees of $53.7 million and granting an injunction preventing RIM from making, using, or offering to sell handhelds, services or software in the U.S. until the date of expiration of NTP's patents, the latest of which is May 20, 2012. The court then stayed that injunction, pending an appeal by the Canadian company."
http://www.workopolis.com/servlet/Content/fasttrac k/20030301/RNEWS-3?section=Technology
o ri es/2003/03/31/newscolumn7.html
r y. html?story_id=2654
http://www.dieselnet.com/news/0106litex.html
http://washington.bizjournals.com/washington/st
http://www.nordicwirelesswatch.com/wireless/sto
Research in Motion's company nickname is "Lawsuits in Motion". Live by the sword, die by the sword.
....
Good luck on your appeal RIM, because you are really going to need it given your karma deficit.
http://www.workopolis.com/servlet/Content/fasttrac k/20030301/RNEWS-3?section=Technology
i es/2003/03/31/newscolumn7.html
. html?story_id=2654
http://www.dieselnet.com/news/0106litex.html
http://washington.bizjournals.com/washington/stor
http://www.nordicwirelesswatch.com/wireless/story
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
The original aloha network is quite different actually.
:)
The way the original ALOHA in hawaii worked was that clients with unidirectional antennas would talk to the "Menahune" or omnidirectional antenna in teh middle. The antenna in the middle was the hub. All the antennae around the middle could send signals at any time they pleased, but if two sent a signal at the same time, the hub wouldn't acknowledge which would mean they would need to resend (sort of like modern colissions with ethernet) This meant the packet sizes had to be made really small to minimize colissions. ALOHA also used DDCMP encoding, due to the mandatory header, so that each client could be identified at the HUB.
There was something called "slotted ALOHA" as well, this minimized colissions by having the antenna in the center send out a pulses. The clients could send only between the pulses. THis minimized colissions because one client couldn't interrupt another just as it was nearing the completion of a packet. You could still get colissions but they would be minimal. The slotted aloha system is still used to some degree with sattelite internet connections and seems to work fairly well. The reason this has to be used is that there is no way for one client antenna to know what another client is doing, unlike your run of the mill ethernet which can 'sense' all other carriers on the line, and therefore knows when to shut up so it doesn't interrupt someone elses signal.
ALOHA was the predecessor to WiFi and any other wireless technology back in the grandfather era.
Hope you enjoyed the history lesson
-I DDoSed your mom.
Look at the patents at http://www.uspto.gov
None of them are anything beyond taking what is commonly done via hardware and adding the word "RF" in there.
They also own the patent on frequency modulation to send data.
NTP Inc btw readily admits that this is it's business model.
Vip
is a bit more focused that most people here think. I thought that it covered the idea of using store and forward technology and the like which is a bit more complex than just using IP to talk to a server wirelessly. And it should be noted that the inventor is an individual. He just hired a law firm (proobably on contigency) to enforce his patents.
http://www.delphion.com/details?pn=US05625670__ A very convoluted system for doing email over a page network. The best part is that all these patents are almost obsolete. Wireless IP is the only way to go for email these days IMNHO. I am sure Nokia, Qualcom, and the like have all the good patents on that:)
NTP used to be fairly large and provided a number of lightweight computers to the educational market. A few years back, a friend of mine worked there when they had offices outside of Vancouver, BC near where MoLicell opened the first rechargeable lithium battery plant. At the time, I was living just down the road. Then they transferred him to Ireland and shortly afterwards closed up operations. (Hi Kaari - I know you're reading this...)
I don't know the extent of their claims or of their patent portfolio, but I do remember that they held quite an extensive patent collection in the handheld market. I agree that a judgment of that magnitude against RIM would be devastating for the Blackberry, but it might be warranted - who knows? Not you or I (small assumption about the reader, but probably not far off). Please also try to remember that both companies are canadian and that canadian patent laws likely differ greatly in key areas than their american counterparts.
Sucks that it's one canadian company suing another canadian company. This could be another case of the all-too-typical SCO-style litigation. Only time will tell.
Hopefully RIM can recover from this. U of Waterloo relies on quite a few donations from RIM, and a lot of students get co-op jobs ( and very good jobs at that ) at the company.
Hopefully this doesn't bring another round of layoffs.
in theory this is the approach in the US and most other countries.
In practice, the US patent office is totally out of control and accepts almost all the applications it receives. This, together with jury trials and the absence of a "loser pays" rule, rewards abusive patent applications and speculative litigation.
If the US doesn't get control of its patent system soon it's going to seriously affect the US's innovation and competitiveness.
Its usual in cases like this for the weakest member of the herd to be singled out - as long as its worth suing.
With a high-profile case like this NTP now have leverage against larger companies, who rather than litigate will end up settling for a fee ($53mill + lawyers fees is a lot of licenses).
In practise of course this is just another example of the US Patent system gone barmy.
As one of the next posters has said 'logical steps' should not be patentable.
In fact this is one of the tenets of acquiring patents "The patent should not be obvious to those familiar with the domain".
Of course using an alternate transport for emails should not be patentable (otherwise there'd be patents for Copper, Fibre, Horse and Cart etc). I suspect that the actual patent would be a little more specific than that.
e.g. Patent 6,452,588 (RIM patent on Handheld Email Device) isn't really a patent on a Handheld Email Device - its a patent on a portable device whose keyboard has been optimised for thumb usage. (I'm surprised Psion never challenged that one)
Patent Nos. 5,625,670; 5,631,946; 5,819,172; 6,067,451 and 6,317,592
All of these are basically the same patent, with subtle enhancements (so subtle is difficult to see what the differences are!)
5,625,670 - looks to be the original transport 'patent' and should be overturnable. 5,625,670
63127592 - a quick look at this suggests that the originality of the patent is that the message will contain a tag indicating origination or destination on a wireless device.
well, if you don't read the patent it makes sense that you would conclude there's "nothing there."
here's a novel idea: let's take a look at the patent in question (US 5,625,670) and see what is actually says...
first, look at the filing history (on the first page of the patent)
This application is a Continuation application of U.S. Ser. No. 07/702,939, filed May 20, 1991, now U.S. Pat. No. 5,436,960; Ser. No. 07/702,938, filed May 20, 1991, now U.S. Pat. No. 5,479,472, and Ser. No. 08/247,466, filed May 23, 1994, now U.S. Pat. No. 5,938,611; which is a Continuation of U.S. Ser. No. 07/702,319, filed May 20, 1991 (now abandoned).
without having the text of the correspondence in front of me, it seems that this patent is the progeny of a series of patents filed earlier. more likely, what happened was that NTP realized their original claims were not being infringed and they needed to modify the patent in order to obtain claims which were being infringed.
this is the "trick" used to great success by lemmelson. file a fat application, watch what other people do, and then file a continuation application with some new claims covering this use. as long as there is support in the original application, this is perfectly legal under US law.
note that under current US law, the patent will expire 20 years after the earliest claimed date of priority - or may 20th 2011. (the application filed in 1994 might have an impact on this, but it's hard to say.)
next look at the amount of prior art which was cited. 14 prior art patents and 9 non-patent references. not much... which suggests there wasn't much prior art. Curis Kuntz, the primary examiner at the USPTO for this case, is no pushover - patents with his name on them usually are pretty solid - so let's give him the benefit of the doubt.
now, let's take a quick look at the claims.... of which there are 276.... the poor examiners... this is really abusive. a multiple warhead nuclear bomb... really hard to shoot down all of them. try reading 100 of them, and then try reading 100 more, and then try reading the last 76 and see if your head doesn't explode. remember that examiners don't get paid in 6 minute increments of an hour (as do attorneys) and have a limited amount of time to do their job...
i don't know which of these 276 claims were at issue in the case, but one can certainly feel sorry for RIM... it's hard to avoid a patent claim when new ones are being shot at you all the time... this may have had something to do with the judge not issuing an injunction.
it would probably be a fair assumption that the claim at issue - probabaly only one of the 276 - is valid and infringed.... NTP had all the information they needed from discovery to know what they needed to say... and they probably scoured the earth for prior art during the process... and they had unlimited time to craft just the claims they needed.
what stinks is that an applicant for patent can do this.
while there is no such thing as compulsory licensing in Europe - where on earth did you read this? - there are far stricter limits on the tricks you can play with adding new claims, or filing continutation applications.
a sensible reform of the US patent system would be to make the applicant stick to the original claims as filed... limit the number of claims to give the examiners a chance to properly do their jobs... and not to allow ex post facto modifications like this. if the applicant didn't claim it at the time of filing, then he or she shouldn't be able to claim it later.
congress - once again - is the problem. not the USPTO.
one thing is for certain, we americans do indeed have the best politicians money can buy!
A reference has to enable a person of ordinary skill in the field to use the invention. Therefore, 20000 Leagues Under The Sea by Jules Verne is not enabling of nuclear powered submarines, and does not prevent patenting such. This is a case where the idea "it would be cool if..." doesn't have a solution in the field.
Not that patents are limited to that. Lifting one end of a widely used printing press used for printing large city newspapers sped up the process by a factor of 3. The invention was in figuring out that this simple action effectively transformed the machine.
Are the NTP patents in the third category, that is, once some bumpkin says "oh, it would be cool..." any old person working in the field could solve the problem? Ah, that's the 53+ million dollar question.