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.

Comments

Freedom...

[hitech69]

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.

Re:overreaching?

[Kyouryuu]

It's purely conflict of interest. The U.S. Patent Office makes money with each patent it grants. Even the application fee alone is substantial. Therefore, there is no economic incentive for the Patent Office to deny patents, no matter how dubious they are. That's why they seem to pass through the system like diarrhea.

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.

What goes around comes around

[augustz]

RIM has sued tons of companies on patent infrigment (they patented every little thing they could). For example.

Research In Motion, makers of the RIM Blackberry smart pager, has filed suit against Handspring alleging that Handspring's Treo communicators violate one of their patents. Specifically, RIM claims to have a patent on the curved keyboard layout used by three of the four Treo devices (the Treo 180g uses Graffiti character recognition instead) as well as on the rounded buttons. No information is available regarding what damages RIM is seeking.

So I have a bit less sympathy for them. What goes around comes around.

Re:overreaching?

[Mz6]

Wait a minute...

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?

Re:Exiting models?

[afidel]

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.