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The BlackBerry Infringing on Other Technologies?
windwaker writes "The maker of the popular BlackBerry waits to see if he's infringing on eight other patents. If this is true, future BlackBerrys will have to be licensed differently, to compensate for the infringement."
At the same time, the U.S. Patent Trademark Office is reviewing the last of the eight patents, which may end up making a stronger case for NTP in the long run, according to one attorney.
seeing as how the PTO has soundly rejected NTP's patents so far (the ones that have been reexamined and made public), i don't quite see where someone would get the opinion that such would make a stronger case for NTP.
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Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
I love it when truly innovative companies are stiffled by patent squatter.
Uck
This is what I do...EVERY DAY
/. and read that there's a new patent infringment case
6:30 AM -- Get up
6:31 AM -- Go to the bathroom
6:32 AM -- Get coffee
6:35 AM -- Open Firefox, go to
Seriously, what's it going to take for this patent situation to be fixed? Or maybe it won't since trial lawyers are the #1 contributors to politicians.
What's wrong with C|NET, they are fairly late on the RIM vs NTP case. The USPTO has already rejected 7 out of the 8 patents held by NTP.
Globe and Mail Article on the patents being rejected.
Strangly my expierence with Blackberry has been the complete opposite.
:)
The BES server integrated seemlessly into my exchange and SQL server. Worked right out of the box. There was a problem syncing Outlook 2003 but Service Pack 3 for the desktop software (now up to version 4) fixed that. My company has 20 blackberries and not one of them has been broken by the end user. We have had 2 with bad flash roms which caused them to lock up at random times but they were replaced under warranty. I have personally dropped my blackberry from heights of 5ft or more to concrete and blacktop more than a dozen times. Got some road rash but no real damage. We have been using these devices both in the US and internationally for more than a year and all 20 users are Berry berry satisfied.
YMMV I guess.
Apple free since 1990!
I've been using a 7520 since it was released in December. I've dropped it a few times, few scratches. Phone is quite rugged and well built. With an SSH client (very slow network) it's indespensable.
Sean Milheim
iDREUS Corporation
The only way the insanity of the current patent system will get sorted out is if it claims high profile corporate victims.
No one in power will ever listen to a bunch of geeks complaining about patented media formats. We need more and more corporates to be bitten on the ass by submarine patents.
So I for one hope the Blackberry does infringe patents. I hope IBM, Sony and any other high tech corporations you can think of get stung with frivolous lawsuits too. I hope someone, somewhere, has patented "using transparency in a graphical user interface" and is just itching for MS to release longhorn.
The only way the system will change is when those with money and power start to suffer as a result of it.
"I realise this is not a very popular opinion but it's the truth, and there for needs to be said" -Bill Hicks
Why should any inovator be able to patent generic simple algorithm that can be devised in 2 hours?
I agree. My post doesn't reveal that I would support this either. Clearly the USPTO doesn't have the resources or skills to appropriately review patents. That is a money issue, I would suppose. Or maybe the fact that the US graduated more sports medicine majors last year than certain engineering fields.
Why, in reality, only powerful companies are able to sue, while small inovators don't have the money needed for lawyers?
Again, another good question. But it only address flaws in the system that need reform, not the underlying theory and benefits of copyrights and patents and their ability to encourage innovation in a market-based economy.
Why lawyers and big (US) corporations are only ones that benefit from software patents, in fact from all sorts of patents?
Ok, well, on your last question, I have to bite. Big corporations are not the only benefactors of patents and copyrights. They give protection to small business and small artisans to reap a temporary reward for their innovation before it is released to the public domain. Take Thomas Edison as a grand example. His patents took him from a small-time innovator to one of the greatest inventors of the 19th / 20th century. His patents (think light bulb) BUILT big corporations (think General Electric) that were able to invest the profits into new products for future generations. After the patents expired, other companies (think Philips) were able to use the original work and patent further innovation in the field. It's a cycle that has proven to work. Reform is needed, but suggesting that innovation would soar without this type of protection confuses me.
I hate to break the news, but the RIM/Blackberry has a patent on the arched keyboard it has. This prevents any other wireless handheld maker from using anything but the less than ergonomic square keyboard layout. Now, having patents can be good, and I'm not saying there isn't value in this one, but I do think that its time for patent holders to stop crying foul all the time. Mediation before litigation, and let the public (via /.-like metamoderation) decide what is fair and what isn't. After all, protecting innovation is one of the tennents of the patent system. The government is also meddling with the marketplace in order to foster competition and quality pricing.... but I think they stifle it more often then foster it. Time for public opinion to be more involved in the making of patent issuance and infringement mediation.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Not to sound like too much of a jerk, but I can support twenty of any computer-related (end user) device (across the globe) pretty easily. I've done it before between Japan, Los angeles, and Orlando.
We have 2,000 blackberries and they suck up more support time/costs than windows does.
You had a 10% DOA rate that amounts to two units. Mine is less than 5%, but it's still a major pain to return 100 units as that task falls to the support personnel.
I cannot wait to move all of our blackberry users to an end-to-end Microsoft solution through exchange and smartphones. Go ahead and bash my "logic" to bits if you must, but RIM as a third-party vendor is not providing the value we are dearly paying for with BES licenses.
It's just not worth it and the savings in out-of-pocket costs (for those above licenses) just by switching to Magneto in Exchange 2003 will more than justify ditching the RIM technology
In addition the Microsoft solution falls under our Corporate Premier Support Services and software Enterprise Agreement for a net increase of zero $ for great support.
Ugh, this is starting to sound like a MS love note and I really didn't plan it that way. I'm just fed up with RIM and their devices that I must continually add extra-cost software to just to get some standard functionality (like reading certain documents, performing workflow, etc.)
Really, the blackberry is hardly ready for a multi-national corporating with an already over-taxed IT support division.
Give me a solution where the users purchase whatever handset they want locally (as long as the OS is compatible) and I can hook it into my corporate "solution" and i'll be happy. We've got people who spend their entire lives dealing with shipping, setting up, returning, RMAing Blackberries and it's not sustainable for us.
Let me ask you this then: Do you feel that protecting processes or hardware is a good idea? How do inventors recoup their research and development investment if the process is trivial to perform once all the work in figuring out how to do it profitably is done? If you do feel that this is a good idea, why is software different?
I'm not trolling; this is the very crux of the whole software patent issue, in my mind. Why is software different? It's *not* mathematical formulas. It's *not* protected by copyright. And I'm *not* talking about stupid patents, as I think that it should be financially painful to try and push that shit through the system in the first place, in any field of study.