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Blackberry In Court Again Over Patents
uqbar writes "Looks like Research in Motion (RIM), the Canadian makers of the portable Blackberry email device, are back in court again. If patent holding company NTP wins their case, then RIM would be barred from selling Blackberry pagers in the US and would owe $54 million. Is this yet another case of overreaching patents gone amok?" We previously covered the original ruling in this case in August 2003.
The headline is a bit misleading. Today is RIM's day in court for hearing on its appeal to the August 2003 decision where they were effectively slapped around.
The Register and a few other newsies reported that RIM and NTP have tried to come to a royalty agreement, but so far have not budged.
You can bet as soon as RIM loses this appeal (likely), they will very quickly come up with a royalty agreement for NTP, and life will go on.
IANAL. I play one on slashdot.
who are working to make our patent system a bit more fair and help with reducing the current abuses we are seeing. Pubpat Electronic Frontier Foundation
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
That would work if the issue was trademark violation.
But it's not.
Trademarks are what you call something; patents are what it does.
Here is the full fee schedule. Fees of note: filing fee is $770. Issue fee is $1,330. Maintenance fees are $990, $2,090, and $3,220. There are also fees for publication ($300), filing an assignment ($40), for filing excess claims (more than 20), filing late responses to the patent office, and many more. In general, "small entities" pay half of the amount listed above, though there are exceptions.
NTP in November 2001 filed a complaint contending that RIM's products and services infringe on at least five NTP patents (numbers 5,625,670; 5,631,946; 5,819,172; 6,067,451 and 6,317,592) granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) covering the use of radio-frequency wireless communications in e-mail systems.
Does this mean that every time I use wlan0 instead of eth0 to check my mail I'm infringing on their patent?
More generally, I would think the Amateur Packet Radio people would have some prior art on this. APR has been around for a while, I think... and certainly someone has used it to check mail.
>RIM has sued tons of companies on patent infrigment (they patented every little thing they could).
Yup. That's how they got the nickname, "Lawsuits in Motion". Let's not forget about RIM Park, which they managed to weasel their name on to despite the city's population having to pay an additional $35.26 tax (5.47% of taxes overall) just to cover the city's funding of the park. Can someone explain to me how you can get your name on a park without either paying for the whole thing, or being a dead celebrity?
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
There is a limit. 35 U.S.C. 286 sets a time limit on damages such that "no recovery shall be had for any infringement committed more than six years prior to the filing of the complaint or counterclaim for infringement in the action."
Who'd have thunk it?
That's never been patented, has it? Not while people had sense, that is. It's so surprising that people find new keyboards.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Well it's at least been used for that purpose since 1987. I think that's the first time I saw two BBSes being connected using amateur radio equipment. Must have been two Fidonet boxes. The connection wasn't quite stable but it worked.
RIM Park has nothing to do to RIM. The city of Waterloo got screwed over by the same contractors that screwed over Windsor and Toronto around the same time. Bidding super low on big municipal projects and billing 5-10x the amount. Why the cities don't communicate and let the same company screw everybody over no one knows. Oh, maybe Mike Harris knows...
There ARE certain limits to the time fileing an action can be delayed in the US (Note: I Am Not A Lawyer). However these times are long for the present situation. Normally, it is possible to dismiss a claim if the filer waited over six years from when they knew about the infringment. Even that rule is limited by other factors, such as whether there is also criminal and not just civil misconduct involved. I'ts not automatic either, a judge still has to decide it applies.
A lot of the precidents in cases such as this go back to a time when the fastest means of notifying someone was horse and rider. Six years doesn't sound so long when messages might take six weeks each way. It was once routine for attempts to settle out of court to take over a year on correspondance alone, regardless of the time spent actually negotiating.
Who is John Cabal?
lyrics and info
"Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose"
- Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster
from "Me and Bobby McGee"
(popularized by the late, great Janis Joplin)
Simple, really. They do one thing, e-mail, and do it well. Very well. Better than anyone else. It is easy to use. They have the common use case down cold.
E-mail is the golden nugget. PDAs, even wirelessly enabled PDAs, are a dime a dozen. Heck, even cell phones are a commodity - cell providers have to give away the product in order to get people to buy the service.
Having a Blackberry will save you an hour a day. The competion is clunkier and harder to use. They don't call 'em "Crackberry" for nothing.
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
RIM (specifically Mike Lazaridis) put a lot of effort into perfecting that keyboard for thumb typing and it is what the blackberry was built around. So yes, there was a lot of innovation there. It seems simple now, but at the time, it was a novel idea.
Of course, I may be biased here because RIM was founded and is based right beside where I go to school (U of Waterloo), and they contribute a lot to and hire a lot of students from said school.
Not entirely. Here's another link to the story (from the Toronto Star's business section):
p ag ename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1 086559808952&call_pageid=968350072197&col=96904886 3851
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?
The most interesting quote is this:
"My guess is that rather than an injunction, NTP would rather have ongoing royalties," said Marc Kaufman, a patent lawyer with Nixon Peabody in Washington. "The time you really want an injunction is when you have a competing business.''
That means you not only keep your Blackberry, but RIM's gonna charge your company more for it to pay royalties to NTP... Which is going to increase your company's demand for a "Return On Investment" on these products... Which means you'll be called more often!
The definition is at MPEP section 509.02. It includes, individuals, non-profits, and small businesses. And I believe the definition is dependent on the number of employees rather than revenue.
Yeah, that and MikeRoweSoft.com
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all