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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."
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.
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.