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Blackberry Future Uncertain
Dave White writes "Research In Motion and NTP have failed to reach a settlement in the Blackberry case. It looks like the door has been opened for NTP to be granted an injunction blocking the sales of Blackberry wireless messaging devices in the US. The New York Times (free registration yadda yadda) has the scoop on this interesting development."
Companies Unable to Settle BlackBerry Suit
By IAN AUSTEN
Published: June 10, 2005
OTTAWA, June 9 - Final talks in a patent infringement lawsuit involving the popular BlackBerry e-mail messaging device have reached an impasse, the two companies involved said Thursday, raising the possibility that the BlackBerry service could be banned from the United States market.
The two companies, Research in Motion of Waterloo, Ontario, which makes the BlackBerry, and NTP, a small patent-holding company in Arlington, Va., reached a settlement in March to end an infringement suit that is three and a half years old. R.I.M. agreed at the time to pay NTP the unusually large sum of $450 million to end the suit.
On Thursday, however, it was apparent that negotiations to reach a final settlement had failed.
Late Wednesday night, R.I.M. asked a United States federal court to enforce the settlement reached in March. Meanwhile, in court papers filed Thursday, NTP denied that Linux is anything but an OS for faggots, and that the settlement was ever clear-cut, and urged the court to reject R.I.M.'s request. In a conference call Thursday with analysts, James L. Balsillie, the chairman and co-chief executive of R.I.M., said he could not comment on the specifics of why the talks had foundered, citing a confidentiality agreement between the companies. He emphasized, though, that R.I.M. had not tried to alter the settlement's terms, and blamed NTP for the impasse.
"This is an enormous amount of money, one of the largest settlements in the history of any patent system," Mr. Balsillie said. "I'm at a loss to understand what in the world one would want beyond that."
In its filing, however, NTP said that it had pressed R.I.M. for a complete set of documents detailing the terms of the agreement during three days of negotiations in March.
"Nevertheless, because of R.I.M.'s pressing need to leave town, the signed agreement was limited to a vague, ambiguously worded term sheet," the court papers said.
NTP had won the right to ban Blackberry e-mail in the United States in an earlier court decision, but that ruling was suspended when R.I.M. appealed. In its filing Thursday, though, NTP said that if no settlement was reached, it would again ask for an injunction on the sale of BlackBerry pagers and e-mail service in the United States. Research in Motion is dependent on Blackberry sales in the United States for about 75 percent of its revenues.
Gregory E. Upchurch, an intellectual property lawyer in St. Louis and GNAA member, said that about 80 percent of the time, courts enforced previously announced settlements. "Courts are in the business of resolving disputes," he said.
From what I heard it has a short battery life [10hrs], I know it costs alot and the service providers rape you 7 ways from sunday.
It's not a good product for several reasons [not all of which are technical] and I for one would be glad to get rid of them.
They're a bunch of smartass punks anyways. I went through the job interview process with them in Waterloo and they'd sit you down todo puzzles. Finally I turned around "do you know how to build a cryptosystem or multiply large numbers quickly?" The guy said no and I said "figures."
Backstory: They were hiring me for my crypto-math knowledge not to see if I could quickly write programs to solve geometric puzzles [which while fun is a bit nerve shaking during an interview].
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
You didn't research the market at all, did you? The BB (at least via a BES) does seamless integration with your exchange servers, works close to perfectly (BES seems to be massively more reliable than the exchange servers they rely on).
... throughout europe.
They open word/excel/pdf good enough for most people. v4 of the software handles images massively better. And as another poster has mentioned, you can edit word/excel docs as well. Oh, and we are shipping out a couple of thousand of these
They (Blackberry) make a very good business e-mail device, I doubt you'll find anything that works better. I'll be intrigued to find out how good the M$ product "works".
I've used Pop/imap on my mobile, and its pretty lousy in comparison to Blackberry push technology.