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End of the Road for U.S. BlackBerry Users ?
_termx23 writes "US BlackBerry users may have to find an alternative source for their email addiction after the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington rejected a request by Research in Motion to rehear its appeal of a patent infringement case brought by NTP, which holds a portfolio of wireless email-related patents violated by RIM." From the article: "As part of that litigation, NTP, whose only assets are wireless e-mail related patents, had been granted an injunction banning the sale of BlackBerry devices in the United States and forcing Research in Motion to stop providing e-mail services to all American customers except government account holders. While the court declined Research in Motion's request for a complete rehearing by all 12 of its judges, it did order the panel of three judges to review some aspects of NTP's patent claims." We've discussed this previously.
I'd be interested to see how Microsoft's involvement with the new Palm pda's is affected by this. I can see Blackberry and Microsoft and Palm all forming a coalition to sue NTP into oblivion, since presumably the palm treo and even the smart phones made by motorola and others violate some aspects of NTPs patents, which sound overly broad.
It's obvious the US patent system is broken. Maybe someone should form a mail-in campaign to our congressmen and senators to make this an issue. That's the way we're supposed to invoke change in this country right? Bitch at our politicians until they get tired of listen to us.
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Actually, the US Federal Government is immune to claims of patent infringement. As specified in 35 USC Ch. 28 Sec. 271:
Check out Good Technologies. They have software that works on both Palm and PocketPC OSes that does much the same of what Blackberry does except that, you have the option of getting different devices for each user.
Granted though, given the nature of the suit against RIM... I don't see how Good would be able to stay out of it either.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
I use Good Technologies for my mobile users and so far it's been golden. It gives us a choice of devices and carriers, provides over-the-air provisioning, and performs like a champ.
BTW, Good has licensed the intellectual property from NTP so they should be OK.
Of course we torture people, we need the information --Gen. Pinochet
the government is allowed to ignore patents.
RIM made a success in a market that should have belonged to a US firm. That's reason enough to kneecap them.
Nice consipiracy theory. I not saying that it doesn't happen...we've all got our bias. But, without any evidence of a lack of impartiality in this case, your comment is just speculation. U.S. courts don't have any serious track record of pro-U.S. bias when it comes to this kind of stuff. For every case you can pull up in favor, I can easily counter with one against.
Just another day in Paradise
This writeup from USA Today
g y/2005-10-07-rim_x.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technolo
says that USPTO "has now issued preliminary rejections of the five NTP patents that RIM was found to have violated in the jury trial. The most recent of those patent office decisions came last week".
Maybe this is why the story isn't getting much news coverage; RIM will probably be OK.
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
An FPGA prototype can be fairly expensive. To make a working modern CPU on an FPGA, you would need a couple of the largest FPGAs currently in existence and these cost around $15k each. Even there, it may not be possible or practical because register files and other internal memories are too massively multi-ported to be practical on FPGAs. Then you need $2000+ PCBs to fit those FPGAs, $100k in software licenses (PCB design, FPGA design, etc.) and over $1M in lab equipment to test/debug the setup.
Requiring a proof-of-concept sounds good but for some things, it is either impossible, impractical, very expensive, takes too long to the point of being obsolete by the time the demo is ready, etc.
Since eMail is just text data and manipulating text data is done by software, this really boils down to software patents. Now, that was a dumb idea and this story is just one more example of why.
Sorry, but that's just dumb. Copyrights and patents don't overlap at all: you cannot copyright inventions, and you cannot patent something that's not an invention. Furthermore the types of protection are significantly different.
Additionally, patents are still perfectly capable of being beneficial, and often are.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
You have to be careful about this "use it or lose it" mindset. It is possible that two viable patents exist between two separate companies that really require each other for a viable product to exist. Now in today's culture the companies might be willing to share IP and both compete with similar products, but let's look at a real case in the past.
Colt owned a patent on the external cam locking cylinder for a revolver. This locking cylinder assured the shooter that the chamber was properly aligned with the barrel of the revolver when it was fired thus making a revolver relatively safe to shoot. However, Smith and Wesson owned a patent (actually had exclusive rights to a patent through licensing) for the bored through cylinder. The bored through cylinder was necessary for a revolver to fire a cartridge instead of being of a muzzle-loading type.
Smith and Wesson could not make a successful cartridge revolver because they couldn't use the locking cylinder. Colt couldn't make a cartridge revolver because they couldn't use the bored through cylinder. Colt could claim that their patent was productive because they used the locking cylinder on their "cap and ball" revolvers. Smith and Wesson could claim that their patent was productive because they did make a line of small caliber pistols that used cartridges. However niether company could use their patent to its maximum gain because of the other patent.
Do you declare both patents null and void so that anyone can use them? Do you arbitrarily declare one or the other null and void so that the other company can dominate? Now we know from history that the patent of Rollin White for the bored through cylinder expired before the patent on the external cam locking cylinder expired and that Colt went on the build the 1873 Colt "Peacemaker" Single Action Army. This gun became one of the most recognized guns in the history of firearms. It could have existed many years previously if patents hadn't stood in the way and it could have existed during the American Civil War and very well could have ended the war much earlier in the hands of Union solders due to the speed of reloading.
Now I agree that a company that holds a patent and does absolutely nothing with it and doesn't even pretend to do anything with it probably deserves to lose their patent. But, it is very difficult to write laws that will be fair in every case. The patent laws were written to help protect the little guy when inventing. The loop holes in the system have been exploited by corporations to make it work like they want. They have flooded the system with so many patents that patents can not be investigated properly and thus the PTO issues patents that are not innovative, can not be produced, or are just plain stupid.
You also have to be careful about not allowing software patents. In our world today, almost everything has software involved. If you completely eliminate software patents, then do you hurt the little guy as well. It is simple and inexpensive to develop a model of some software improvement (maybe even an innovative improvement) using a PC to simulate everything and test it. It may be implemented in a blackbox solution for production, but it still involved software. Most of the things in our homes have software of some sort (microwave oven, range, tv, radio, even your refrigerator, freezer, dishwasher, etc might have software in ROM). Were those new features innovative at the time they were invented? Probably, but they are software still.
I have no sig, does anyone have one to spare?
- NTP owns six patents that RIM is violating. These patents were submitted at the dawn of PDAs -- before the Newton, in fact -- and proposed the general notion of a wireless handheld which receives email, including protocols, long before this was an obvious notion.
- The original patent submitter actually built devices based on these patents and hawked them at trade shows.
- NTP's lawsuit includes the original inventor as one of its litigants. He's directly suing RIM.
- RIM completely ignored NTP's requests for a year.
- NTP wasn't formed to go after patents in general: it was largely formed to give the original patent submitters enough power to go after RIM for flaunting them -- and believe me, RIM was flaunting.
- RIM behaved monstrously at court. They tried to starve NTP to death by dragging out everything, repeatedly lied to the judge (to the point that he issued a condemnation of them), and even appealed to Congress to throw out the case by fiat because they'd given Congressmen Blackberries and so if RIM lost the case it'd create a problem with "national defense".
- RIM has been doing whatever they can to suggest that NTP is a patent whore.
I hate patent whores. They are evil. But NTP is not one of themI. They invented the concepts, produced products based on them, and were screwed by RIM. RIM deserves to fry.On what grounds? Having a patent upheld by various courts hardly ranks as tortious behaviour. They would have to prove that NTP damaged them in some significant manner through illegal activity or breach of contract. Fat chance of that. Unless you're an entity with the ability to spam the patent system. The system of granting patents is thoroughly screwed up right now (lack of resources to properly review applications), which favors this unethical but entirely legal behavior. So what we need to do is fix the approval system. What we're getting in the way of 'reform' - 'first to file', rather than 'first to invent' is going to encourage the current spamming problem to an even greater degree and remove incentives for inventors with fewer resources to file patents. In other words, we'll get Microsoft's definition of 'Freedom to innovate'.
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