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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."
If you became employed by Research In Motion, would that be a RIM Job?
This verdict is quite a blow to Research In Motion, but an injunction against RIM to stop selling the BlackBerry would be devastating. I have to agree with Balsillie in his assessment that an injunction of that magnitude would be unlikely. The US$23.1 million dollar settlement could also be overturned in February. After all, anything can happen in a jury trial, and it is really not until an appellate court gets the case that the legality of NTP's claim is truly measured.
I am sure that Handspring and Good Technology, companies that have felt RIM's legal wrath in the past, are happy to see RIM get a little taste of its own medicine. An interesting thing to note about NTP is that it has no commercial operations at all. It is simply a holding company that has the patents. Needless to say, owning and defending patents could easily be a source of revenue for a company. As it relates to this case it seems that type of business structure may be profitable.
RIM finally reaps what they sowed.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
I think that recent conversations about patents and such talk about how foolish patents like this are: infringed on its patents covering the use of radio frequency wireless communications in e-mail systems.
I really dont think logical next steps should be patentable. I would like to patent using nano technology to make monitors as easy to read as print, or, using light below the visible spectrum to read optical information at even smaller wavelengths, or...
Besides, I think that RIM has really done a lot to immprove the state of communications in large corporations
paul reinheimer
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.
I'm wondering that myself. Wouldn't radio telegrams, like the ones sent from the Titanic in 1912, constitute prior art?
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
But my patent actually does something.
Email over wireless sounds WAY too broad to me. I hope RIM finds markets outside of the US where approval of patents on the grounds of "non-obvious" and "inventiveness" is much stricter.
While I consider RIM a competitor to what I'm doing, I wish them all the best, as they have some very fine products.
I know, let's take another two innovative inventions and put them together in an obvious way, then we can all be rich!
I think I'll patent wireless car audio. Less messy hookup, easily swap your system out when it breaks/gets old, etc. Aside from some probable technical difficulties, once this comes out I'll be rich. I'll just sue.
Seriously, could this mean that I can't get mail on my cel phone anymore? Or is this specifically limited to devices designed to provide such a feature exclusively? (And wouldn't SMS pagers infringe, since that is a form of wireless electronic mesaging?)
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Innovation by litigation things are getting rediculous and the only people to profit from this nonsense are Lawyers.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
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.
and that would be useful how?
As a PDA and depending on the model, maybe a cellphone.
If the injuction goes through then you won't be able to wirelessly connect a blackberry to the network because there won't be the essential key to their operation... RIM.
A new feature is just a bug waiting to happen. And vice versa.
I was afraid my clocks would drift hopelessly.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
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
If the jury was asked whether RIM violated the patent, they probably made the right decision in saying that they did.
But that's because NTP's patent is ridiculous. Who are they going to go after next? TabletPC users who happen to use a wireless connection? People who read E-mail through a handheld connected to their cell phone?
RIM is right in having this patent re-examined. Now, I think RIM itself is a thoroughly disgusting company when it comes to stupid patents and that if this infringement claim holds up it would be poetic justice. But that is little satisfaction in the long term: if these kinds of patents hold up in court, it is bad for the industry.
You cannot patent that, because the price of a patent and the price of enforcing a patent has been set way above the assets that a normal person will be able to afford.
Nor can the company you work for patent it; if they do, they won't profit from it, because they will simply be sued for some cross-licensing issue.
Sorry, but patent barratry is a privilege reserved for the nobility: the pure legal attack firms.
I need not say it again, but I will: Patent law is inherently broken.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
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
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.
I agree that a company that has designed and created a working implementaion of a product would be entitled to sue another company that has created the same product. However, in this partictular case, it seems that the company that is being sued is the one that has created a successful working implementation, and the only reason why NTP actually gets anything is the simple fact that they got to the very general idea first. The patenting of the very concept of wireless e-mail is just whacked.
This lawsuit is good only for one company: NTP, and terrible for RIM and the consumers. NTP is merely a holding company that creates no innovation, just hogs ideas before other companies who have intention to make a working implementation and create a functional product. The consumer market would be held back from a good product if RIM goes out of business, and the Blackberry may very well rise in price if they don't.
This particular use of patent holding companies should be outlawed. If someone wants to patent something, they should be required to actually make innovative use of the patent within a short amount of time. Otherwise, holding companies just become minefields for industry and encourage bogus patents such as this one -- 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 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.
Don't forget that RIM is the same company that received a U.S. patent for "A hand-held electronic device with a keyboard optimized for use with the thumbs"
Just ask Adobe and Macromedia for a real world view of how ludicrous software patents have become.
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:)
Then I hope that all of the corporations that have invested heavily in RIM's services will have to sit back and watch while their investment goes dark.
Then I would like to see them create a fake grassroots movement or a political action committee that aims to reform the patent processes before it happens to them.
Though I'm wary of large companies deciding the future of intellectual property law, I hope that they see that no-one wins in a nuclear arms race like this one where any yahoo with an idea can build the bomb that ... ahh, screw the metaphors.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
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.
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!
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.