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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."
Would it be legal for a wireless company to sell their existing stock of blackberries? Either way, there's about to be an insane black(berry) market on eBay. Max
This sounds wild. The broad definition in the article seems like it could apply to pretty much any wireless technology these days, including cell phones and wi-fi systems. Why did Blackberry get singled out? Are most companies already licensing this patent or something like that?
I can't stand it when people overload acronymns. It's a bad situation in a field when there are literally books of acronyms, but when you use NTP, I would surmise that the vast majority of people think the Network Time Protocol (which my advisor invented) as opposed to Non-Thermal Plasma. It's not acronymns I have anything against, it's just using the obscure ones that conflict with much better known ones.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
X.25 based ham radio bulletin boards have been in existance for a long, long time - including e-mail and text messaging in addition to binary file transfers. The patent issues seem pretty thin here.. does anyone have more information on their claim?
..don't panic
Slashdot readers should understand that RIM is in no way less guilty of abusing the patent and copyright systems than is NTP. As seen in a link from the article, RIM has pursued similar measures against Good Technology, who, so far as I can tell, appear to be writing software for RIM's platforms which allows users to use the devices with Good Technology's competing services.
However, that doesn't mean that RIM, if they ultimately lose the appeal, will get what they deserve. Patenting a system of using wireless radio to transmit and receive email from a handheld device is a blatant abuse of the patent system.
Yes, perhaps 15-20 years ago it may not have been obvious.
However, given the introduction of small scale radio transmitters/receivers (er, which isn't exactly new), and powerful small scale electronics, it is absolutely obvious.
This is analogous to being awarded a patent for "a car which uses a 'gravity shield' to hover and propel itself along several feet above the surface", and then at some point in the future when a large scale and low power 'gravity shield' is invented (hah!), trying to enforce that patent.
A wireless network of handheld devices for email is an absolutely obvious application of existing technology. It was not even an "adaptation" of existing technology. It was just a matter of doing the obvious: 1) we transmit data which is email, 2) we wirelessly transmit data, 3) we have powerful electronic devices that can fit in the palm of one's hand, and it is obvious that 4) we can wirelessly transmit email to handheld devices.
5) be awarded patent on obvious combination of existing technology but fail to develop or implement it yourself
6) ???
7) Profit!
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
I have no use for RIM. However a group of my friends convinced me to get the RIM pagers when they were bundled with Yahoo Instant Messaging a couple years ago. The pagers themselves were still outrageously expensive considering what they did. The service itself was spotty at best I spent more time twisting and turning and moving from one spot to another to actually receive a signal and about 1 message in 3 that I sent actually got anywhere. Since the monthly price for the service was better with the Yahoo version than with the standard RIM service (about a third I think) we all put up with the shoddy service.
But after only 6 months, RIM pre-announced that they would not be continuing their deal with Yahoo, and that our only option would be to discontinue the service or convert to the much more expensive RIM service (which actually didn't even have instant messaging at all!) This was a pure bait and switch deal as far as I was concerned.
The combination of 802.11 devices coming down in price as well as initiatives such as Verizon's putting wireless hot-spots at all the phone booths will obsolete this technology real fast.
If this puts them out of business, good riddance!
(Who ever said I don't hold a grudge?)
Perhaps it's different in the U.S. but I recall a case maaaaany years ago in the U.K. where a patent was refused because the idea had previously been seen in a children's comic.
The idea was for an automatic cat flap that opened when the trained cat pressed on a pad. Apparently the patent office clerk either saw a similar design on his son's comic (The Beano or The Dandy, U.K. comics for the under ten) or spoke of it and the son brought the comic to his attention.
Either way, the patent was knocked back for not being an original work - the idea had been presented before, albeit as an act of fiction in a comic. I'm fairly sure this is genuine, it made the headlines (mumble) years ago "when ah were just a nippa".
Surely the same approach is used today in that, if an idea is already in general use, then it can't be an original work and therefore cannot be patented!?
Go permanent? In your dreams and my worst nightmares.
"Needless to say, owning and defending patents could easily be a source of revenue for a company."
/. earlier this year.
I remember my father, who reads Fortune and Forbes, telling me of companies that do just that. I think there was also some coverage on
The one company (I forget names; I suck at names; hell, it took me 3 years to put fiber optics and lasers with JDS Uniphase) he was tellng me about--all they did was examine existing patents for loopholes, ways around the current patent, or something naturally extensible. They then patented that extension.
No lab. No research. It's all paper pushers. Mostly lawyers in the company, but also a fair number of tech/sci experts.
It seems to be a new legal version of the old fight club formula, you know, cost of a reacall/lawsuit...
Otherwise, holding companies just become minefields for industry and encourage bogus patents such as this one
And your evidence of bogosity is what? Was the judge hoodwinked? Did RIM not have an opportunity (and awesome incentive) to make every argument available to them as to non-infringement and invalidity? Looks like all evidence, at least, of the claim being "bogus," is to the contrary.
-- where some unethical weasel files for hundreds of patents on obvious technologies and then just waits for someone to come along and bump into them. Absolutely disgusting.
Is it possible that someone just didn't want to pay a reasonable royalty for legitimately patented technology, on the theory that they were generating kazillions of dollars from their exploitation of it -- far more than the inventor had -- and could better survive the lawsuit?
What, exactly, is an individual inventor to do if he cannot partner with monied persons to state his claims? In this case, RIM was FAR from defensesless -- indeed they threw their weight around to make this case difficult as possible for the plaintiffs, and lost.
Sounds more like someone lost a bet than someone got taken for a ride. No doubt, there is a fair chance on appeal, plaintiffs win most trials, and about half of patent cases can be reversed on appeal (although that seems to have dropped off significantly of late).
But bogosity? Nonsense. A trial was held, for gosh sakes. RIM couldn't invalidate this patent, and couldn't engineer around it.
Has anybody else actually read (well, browsed) this thing? It describes any PalmPilot or Handspring (they come with email software) that has a cellular modem! Or any pager that can receive text.
Batou: Hey, Major... You ever hear of "human rights"? Major: I understand the concept, but I've never seen it in action
RIM dont have anything. They rant about how brilliant push email is yet to do this your blackberry has to sustain a 24/7 GPRS connection - continually pinging a server so it knows where and who it is. How this is better that using a standard RFC protocol such as pop or imap and checking at regular intervals I don't know.
And then they launch their consumer version, which is strongly denied by RIM to be Pull and Push because their whole "uniqueness" is push (put it pulls froms your pop account and pushes to you).
Its all a load of crock - the whole business model is based on hype, CEO masturbation and obfuscation. Why the RIM server cannot do pop or imap collection is pure cynicism - its not like there are hard protocols. But, as one of RIM's sales people informed me, its all about upselling.
In the UK an exchange licence for 5 users is 1200UKP. The RIM server is 2500UKP. So for 3700UKP plus hardware costs you cant have this wonderful push pish across a 100% proprietary set of protocols. A Rim guy tried to convince me that it wasnt propietary because they used triple DES encryption - thats like saying its not proprietary because we use ASCII. But your email is secure? Whats the point of securing your email from your mail server to your client when it was plain and dandy when it travelled around the internet to get to your mail server.
No thanks, Ill take my linux mail server with unlimited email accounts and free, proven software and a load of Sony Ericsson P800s set to check for mail every minute. Then I will tell everyone that its push (they will never know the difference).
(btw the 7230 blackberries are currently more expensive than the P800)
Sorry about the rant - just been through 3 days of trying to find out about blackberries for some customers that have fallen for the hype. Oddly all are US owned companies trading in the UK. With a bit of luck blackberries wont get much further.
Some friends turned their hobby into a company (You might recognize the little Mars skate-board in the lower right.)
Not sure how this relates to what the patents claim, but I suspect it probably involves some quibble ("Lemon fresh improved email"). RIM hasn't been very nice with their patents, but I had to see anyone nailed with these things.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
When I first heard abou the RIM devices, they were already pretty well known. This was about two or three years ago. Since then I've seen them become fairly wide spread. (look at the federal government)
It seems that in order to "actively enforce" a patent or copyright, you just have to wait until a desirable amount of royalties or licensing fees have been accrued before you defend your IP in court. As far as I can tell -- from their claims, at least -- my transmitting this message through slashdot violates their IP claims. (I might be wrong -- argue with me)
Some of you are saying these RIM devices are useless and who needs wireless email anyway, but you're missing the point that they can do a LOT more than that. RIM has (had?) an SDK available for free download on their website in the past so they obviously intended people to develop their own apps for these things. My company (IBM) is one of them. I don't use it as much now, but for at least a year I was depending on one of these things to support me as a technician in the field. Our whole service-call system runs on our RIMs and it saves soooo much time and headache. We receive, update and close calls with a few clicks/turns of the thumbwheel as well as filling out the form to send back to IBM detailing what happened (used for billing/parts tracking among other things). Without these, I would have to either call a human being or dial in with my laptop. Two things that aren't much fun when you're driving all over the place trying to get work done.
I was curious about what this settlement means to our use of these devices, but then I was reading through and saw how people think that RIM will most likely license the technology. Losing these things would suck for us techs.