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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.
I do- does this cover my use of my private pager to keep track of network outages at my house? (pager is numeric only- usage is a self-written monitoring program that checks LAN and WAN pings, incoming e-mail, and caller ID and sends numerically coded messages through dialup of a standard Winmodem). I kind of doubt it- but the article doesn't seem to include ANY hint of what the patents do and do not cover.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Didn't someone once say that "freedom is just another word for having nothing else to lose". Hmmm... don't think America is very free anymore, and the patent system is not only wasting the industries time, it's wasting the justice system's time dealing with all these bogus court cases. What really scares me if one of these looney judges rules in favor of upholding these vague patent claims.
The irony is that now both parties and the judicial branch of the government will likely spend more money just sorting out the dilemma created by the greedy Patent Office's apathy. Not that the Patent Office cares. They already have their cash.
So I have a bit less sympathy for them. What goes around comes around.
I have never filed for a patent before, so I am unsure of the exact process. However, I thought that fees associated with filing a patent were non-refunadable. Meaning that the USPTO will get their money whether or not the application is approved. Am I correct in this?
Hmmm.
The blackberry is basically a limited PDA environment with build in cellular data service (and voice too on a couple of the really expensive models). How they ever got to be so popular I have no clue. We used them at IBM for dispatching calls to us field techs but the coverage was really poor and any PDA with a cellular addon would have been tons more usefull (like say for accessing map sites since we were driving to new locations every day). My only guess is that RIM/Cingular is able to make private networks for large customers that make them feel more secure then a general IP solution would.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I have a friend who's a clerk for a law firm in town. They make her carry one of those beasties around 24/7, and leave it on 24/7. If she turns it off, the Masters know about it.
They can even do GPS tracking with the things.
Incidentally, I can't think there's anything about this device that's patent-worthy. The use of a new networking technology (in this case DPMS or whatever the IP-over-cell-phone protocol is) to do the same old networking stuff isn't patentable, since it's such an obvious application.
The development of practical electrical generation and tramsmission methods is worthy of a patent.
So is running that electricity through a tungsten filament to produce light.
The subsequent development of the alkaline battery is, perhaps, patentable.
The combination of those alkaline batteries with an incandescant bulb to make a flashlight should not be patentable.
I disagree. I think you should encourage people of heavy academic and practical training to become patent clerks.
I know it's a job I'd be interested in. Imagine seeing new ideas constantly flowing across your desk.
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That's why I've been saying that the PTO should be sued everytime an invalid patent is found that caused financial loss to a defendant having to prove it invalid.
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Exactly.
You could even have a collected database of unpatented prior art and existing patents that is available for searching.
Then upon submission, a computer could compare the information in the patent to existing patents and return a list of possible prior art or patents.
Once you receive the list, you would need to re-assert that your patent does not duplicate any of the items listed.
If after that, the human reviewer deems otherwise, it would be a strike against you. Fines would be appropriate after a significant amount of abuse, or possible just on steep slope of increasing fees for rejected patents which duplicate prior art or patents of which you were undeniably _informed_.
-Jacob
You could even have a collected database of unpatented prior art and existing patents that is available for searching.
This would be the database of granted patents. The USPTO already searches this database. The problem is that such a search misses all the other prior art, particularly that which wasn't patented, for whatever reason.
There are also commercial companies that specialize in such databases and searchs. One example here.
a computer could compare the information in the patent to existing patents and return a list of possible prior art or patents
This is very difficult without full-blown natural language processing, computer vision (for the diagrams) and technical AI to understand the context. There are many, many, ways to describe the same idea in ways that seem different, even without a deliberate attempt at obfuscation. Everyone invents their own jargon. I'm afraid you're stuck with human beings for this task at the moment. (They're called patent examiners.)