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

overreaching?

[Mz6]

"Is this yet another case of overreaching patents gone amok?"

Nah, it's not like Microsoft has patented double-clicking or something... oh wait...

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.

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:overreaching?

[CharlieHedlin]

Ah, but if they have a reputation for granting, people will file more junk patents.

If they start rejectiong patents it would not take long for people to wise up and only file legitimate (define that how you would like) patents. Their income would fall rapidly.

Its amazing. Government is just like every company, species, etc. It grows as fast as it can given the enviroment. We need Libertarian pricipals so that we can check this, cutting fat inefficient agencies. This is just as predators check the rabit population.

Re:overreaching?

[angle_slam]

Partially correct. There is a filing fee that is non-refundable, even if the application is rejected. However, there is also something called an Issue Fee, which is only charged once a patent is granted. In addition, there are Maintenance Fees, which are charged at 3.5, 7.5, and 11.5 years, in order to keep the patent from expiring.

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.

Re:overreaching?

[Artifakt]

I don't usually nit-pick spelling, but this case was seriously funny. If we have to wait until a whole generation goes through school with libertarian principals to fix this, we're doomed. How about principles?

Re:overreaching?

[Short Circuit]

Hell. No.

That would keep me from ever applying for a patent. I've come up with a lot of neat ideas. When I tell someone who's been working in the field about them, I find out that, yeah, they've been doing that for years.

For example, at ten or eleven years old, I thought of storing video as only the differences between each frame. I'd never heard of it before, but it sounded like a good idea to me. Then I came to find out they've been doing that for a long time.

Or another example...I recently posted a journal entry about a roleplaying tool I want to write. Someone mentioned that that tool was pretty much a stripped-down MUD with some side features. I've never used a MUD before, and I'm not familiar with their features.

I'd also given thought about using interference between two inaudible waveforms to produce an audible signal. Well, we've seen that one posted on Slashdot.

I've about given up trying to come up with original ideas...someone else has already had them. And if you fine me for trying to patent something I think is original, it becomes completely uneconomical for me to try to come up with ideas for money.

Exiting models?

[MalaclypseTheYounger]

If BlackBerry loses this case, does that mean I can give back my BlackBerry that my job makes me carry around with me 24/7?

FreeEEEDOM!!!

Or better yet, maybe my Blackberry will have to meet a certain 'accidental' demise, and they will be unable to give me a new one due to this patent hearing.

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.

Re:Exiting models?

[mccrew]

How they ever got to be so popular I have no clue.

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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Same case, this is the appeal.

[JasonUCF]

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.

Re:Same case, this is the appeal.

[happyfrogcow]

headline: "Blackberry In Court Again Over Patents"

lets analyze.

First word: Blackberry
Who is this article about? Blackberry.

Second+Third word: In Court
Where is Blackberry? In Court

Fourth word: Again
So they have been there before? Is this a continuation of the previous dispute? Yes and yes.

Fifth+Sixth word: Over Patents
Why was Blackberry in court again? Over Patents

Now, why was this misleading?

It's a new business model...

[acariquara]

...suing your enemies into oblivion.

Wait, I think Microsoft got that patented, scratch that.

Re:It's a new business model...

[s4m7]

Wait, I think Microsoft got that patented, scratch that.

Microsoft may have the patent, but I thought they sold an exclusive license to SCO for this new "sue them into oblivion" technology.

In other news, MS has announced a fatal flaw in their "sue them into oblivion" technology, and will be releasing a service pack sometime in the next 90 days. seems in the current version you actuallly have to have a case.

Prior Art

[PktLoss]

It seems like the court case should have waited pending an end to the resolution of the US Patent Offices' re-examination of the patents in question. The whole thing becomes a non-issue if the patents are thrown out.

CEO's response

[Anonymous Coward]

The CEO of NTP had this to say: "We're really going to lick rim in this case".

Operation Hammertime

Re:Does anyone

[Marxist Hacker 42]

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.

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.

Should be a time limitation!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this kind of delayed lawsuits even permitted? If someone is infringing on your patent(s) it should be your right and DUTY to enforce your patent immediately. These guys instead wait, let the infringer spend money and make money, and THEN they sue for larger amounts than would otherwise have been sensible.

Are we to believe they hadn't heard of the Blackberry until recently? Ludicrous!

Re:Should be a time limitation!

[millahtime]

Why is this kind of delayed lawsuits even permitted?

It's simple. They are allowed because they make lawyers and the court system a lot of money.

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:What goes around comes around

[shepd]

>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?

Not quite

[igrp]

Around here, there's still two groups of people who still carry pagers: doctors and law enforcement officers. The pager system is still way more robust than GSM and serves as a fallback system for a lot of law enforcement agencies.

Doctors still carry them for two reasons: first of all, they're safe. Pagers have been in use for decades and are known to generally not interfere with hospital equipment (unlike GSM phones, which can cause really weird behaviour in some monitoring equipment). And secondly, they're reliable. In an emergency situation, when everybody grabs their cell to check on their loved ones cell coverage usually drops to 0% in a jiffie (yes, I know that GSM networks can be configured to prioritize certain SIMs through the HLR but I can tell you from experience that that doesn't really work reliably). Pagers, on the other hand, don't need a lot of bandwidth and work reliably.

Having said that, Blackberrys were a nice idea when they were first introduced. These days, though they're useless without effective filtering. I am subscribed to a bunch of mailing lists and I don't particularly like the idea of staring at a small b/w device for long periods of time to find that one important email I happen to be looking for. That's especially true if I have instant access to my IMAP account using my PDA (using WiFi, which tends to drain the battery, or my cell phone). Plus, around here, there's usually a computer nearby no matter where I go.

What a silly patent.

[Entropius]

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.

Prior Art

[igrp]

APR has been around for a while, I think... and certainly someone has used it to check mail.

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.

Live by the patent, die by the patent

[marderj]

It wasn't too long ago that RIM managed to crawl out of a hole by filing frivolous lawsuits for patent infringement. Remember when they filed suit against Handspring over the elliptical shape of the buttons on the keyboard? They justified it by saying they 'invested substantial research and development and marketing effort' into the design and it wasn't fair that Handspring should be able to reap the rewards of their hard work. A fucking keyboard. I hate to see another stupid patent lawsuit, but I have a hard time being sympathetic to their cause. As far as I'm concerned this is poetic justice.

Just a thought.

[Saggi]

If this goes on for much longer the US will become a low-tech country. It will not be possible to invent or put new technology out on the market there, just because of the risk of getting to court. The market will move elsewhere and only old and tested devices (that have certain "prior art") will remain in the US.

Luckily I live in Europe...

But will the European Union adopt the same madness as the US? If this becomes the case we will see new technology evolve in Asia... (did anyone mention China?)

Just a thought.