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.

Comments

Patents Already Rejected?

[tabdelgawad]

This writeup from USA Today

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technolog y/2005-10-07-rim_x.htm

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.

Re:Racketeering

[feijai]

[sigh] The people that get modded +5:Insightful these days (and at 0 I don't expect anyone to see this, argh)... A quick rundown about NTP. For more info, see the excellent article in The Washingtonian (DC's local magazine) debunking the crap RIM has been spreading.

1. 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.
2. The original patent submitter actually built devices based on these patents and hawked them at trade shows.
3. NTP's lawsuit includes the original inventor as one of its litigants. He's directly suing RIM.
4. RIM completely ignored NTP's requests for a year.
5. 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.
6. 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".
7. 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.