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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."
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
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 was afraid my clocks would drift hopelessly.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
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.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
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.
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!