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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."
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
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!