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Supreme Court spurns RIM
l2718 writes "NTP has just won the latest round in its court battle against Research in Motion (makers of the Blackberry). Today's
Order List from the US Supreme Court includes a denial of certiorary for RIM's appeal. This follows the Circuit Court of Appeals' denial of review en banc we have covered previously. As sometimes happens, the court nevertheless accepted amicus curiae briefs from several groups, including Intel and the Canadian government." The potential impact of this may mean the shutdown of Blackberry's network. I hope the crackberry addicts have lots of methadone onhand.
Regardless of the outcome, the end result is still wasted resources. Years of legal action costs quite a bit. Even just the financial resources, let alone the time, wasted on such endeavours could be better put towards technical research. At least then we'd have something productive to show in the end.
While many claim that patents strive to increase the efficiency of the market, it is quite clear they do not. Indeed, the resources funneled off to deal with this legal battle could have actually been used for useful means. Anyone who strives for an efficient market cannot condone this sort of wasteful behaviour.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
...you're probably right. *I*, however, would dearly love to see the US Govt. gets its services cut because of the stupididity that patents are in this country!
It's scary to read a sci-fi book about the future where someone can download several gig of public information...and realize that our "IP" laws don't allow that sort of thing...
Anyway, I raise a toast to NTP, wish them great luck, and hope the Blackberries stop working here - we need a real wake-up call!
--LWM
NTP are exploiting weaknesses in the system.
So long as the USPTO has not ruled, they can blackmail RIM. They just need to get the court to agree to shutdown RIM for one day, to win the huge amounts of money they are seeking. The USPTO can invalidate whatever patents they like after that, it's not going to affect the deal they strike.
This is a perfect case of patent agression. Experts in the legal process extorting huge amounts from innovators. Welcome to the way business is going to be run for the next decades.
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Sadly, I have been hoping for RIM to fail. The reason why is know that people do not change things until a massive, irrational event occurs in a system before people will attempt to fix it.
The judges have been ruling correctly. Regardless of whether or not the Patent Office should not granted the patents or it plans to over turn the patents is and should be irrelevant. The patents HAVE been granted and the courts are obligated to protect them. It's like making up rules for a game and then in the middle deciding which rules are and are not going to be enforced. At best it makes the game an irritation, at worse it makes it unplayable. The Patent Office has got this idea that it can "do over" anything it wants so it grants over 90% of the crap that flows through. The courts are obligated to protect the crap, as per law; otherwise, the courts would BE the Patent Office, if they decided what was and was not a real patent.
Bel, the mostly sane.. "Of course I can't see anything! I'm standing on the shoulders of idiots." -- Me
Since I know practically zip about this litigation and these patent issues, the first place I went after reading the headline was to google for a briefing. Here, I found the following:
NTP, which has no employees, convinced a jury in Spencer's Richmond, Virginia, courtroom in 2002 that Research In Motion had infringed patents related to wireless e-mail.
I know the assininity (is that a word?) of this has been phrased and rephrased many times in many discussions, but... WTF?!? Aren't patents supposed to protect inventors/innovators? I may be jumping to conclusions about NTP, but how can a company that exists solely to litigate patent-infringers get away with what it does?
I envision a land where there are "justices" appointed because they are "just", and "judge" based on the heart behind a simpler code of "justice," rather than human turing machines stripped of the power to truly judge, trying to apply an ugly and endless stream of spaghetti-legislation to human, nonlinear situations?
Did such an idealized system of law ever exist? May it yet? I don't know, but the more I learn about politics and legislation the more similarities I see between the modern process of developing laws and the process of developing software... I don't doubt that there are some legislators who would, if given a machine with the ability, replace human judges altogether in favor of a more predictible expert system.
Tangent? Yes. Rant? Yes. Tinfoil hat? Maybe. Relevant? You decide.
Patents inherently aren't evil. If I invent a machine to stop it from snowing on my driveway (yes, I'm in Canada :P), I don't want some other company to rip apart my machine and start building their own without having to go through the R&D that I went through. They don't have all of that invested money to make back, and so they sell it for 1/2 the price that I'm selling it for. Patents protect me from this.
If, however, I think of a machine to stop it from snowing on my driveway, patent it, and never develop the product, then that's evil. This is what NTP has done in this case.
this all depends on your point of view, the point of view of the creators of the patent and copyright systems was that nobody would produce anything worthwhile without protection from people copying them, the parent of this post seems to share that view.
the opposing view is that preople invented things and produced works of art for centuries before any patent system, or copyright system came in to place, why would you expect that they would suddenly stop now?
in reality nobody can guess what would happen without these protections, sure people invented and created for centuries without protection, but at the same time, they didn't have to worry about some huge corporation running off with their idea and making millions while they got nothing, they also didn't have to worry about their copyrighted works being re-produced for free by people with no special skills...
I have no doubt that if both the patent system and the copyright system completely vanished people would still invent and produce, the question really revolves around "how much" they would produce, and nobody knows for sure.
it's obvious the current system is broken, but most likely some form of a system does in fact need to be in place... it's just a matter of where the correct "balance" is...
If I invent a machine to stop it from snowing on my driveway (yes, I'm in Canada :P), I don't want some other company to rip apart my machine and start building their own without having to go through the R&D that I went through. They don't have all of that invested money to make back, and so they sell it for 1/2 the price that I'm selling it for. Patents protect me from this.
This just kills me. The reward for the effort of inventing your machine is not having snow on your driveway, and having the satisfaction that you made something usefull, and maybe even a "first mover" advantage if you run a company. Not a global monopoly who locks everyone else out - even if the machine would have been invented anyhow, even if they invented it with their own R&D. It's not "protection", because in a patent free world you are more free to copy and improve on other inventions too. In a patent world, big companies have more resources to lock you out, then you have to lock them out, it'd be foolish to believe otherwise.
Yes, it really is that simple, it only takes the tinist ammount of study to understand that creation and invnetion will continue at their pace if patents go to hell where they belong.
Oh, sure. Pharmaceutic companies would continue to invest eight-, nine-, and even ten-figure sums into developing a drug knowing that, once developed, any competitor could produce and sell exactly the same thing without having invested the GNP of Albania in developing it.
It only takes the tiniest amount of study to understand that, without patents, the pharmaceutic industry would cease to exist. A lot of other technology-based industries would also be crippled or destroyed.
... and no, I don't mean his IQ or his ethics.
If the patents are valid, then the patent-holder should be able to get relief from an infringer in the courts. The patents are assumed valid. So rather than wait for the PTO to get around to ruling on whether the patents really are valid, the judge is avoiding "justice delayed" by moving the case forward.
But the PTO seems to think that the patents may not be valid.
But the judge can't rule based on the "maybe" that is all that he's gotten from the PTO so far.
Now, it would be reasonable for the judge to say, given that there is still question about the validity of the patents, and given that the patent holder does not have a competing business that will be injured by competition from RIM/Blackberry, and given how much RIM's business would be injured by an injunction, the balance favors waiting for the PTO to rule on the validity and taking things from there. But it isn't as cut and dried as all the techies are making it sound, because it isn't cut and dried that the patents are garbage, and even if it is, it isn't certain what the PTO will rule. This creates a very sticky mess for the judge.
I think you miss a level of complexity in economics here. Patents exist not to protect inventors, but to give them a monetary incentive to innovate: we (the people) promise them a limited monopoly in return for a disclosure of their invention. I say nothing about the merits of the patents in the instant lawsuit since I haven't read them.
Now there are different ways a patent-holding inventor can make money off his monopoly. Remeber -- the inventor is good at inventing things, but not necessarily at the business end of things, at marketing, or at using patent law to protect the monopoly he's supposed to have. Therefore, one way for the inventor to make money from his monopoly without being a businessman or a lawyer is to sell the rights for the invention. Along the way it's important to remember that money today is worth more than money tomorrow.
For example, a venture capitalist might buy the rights for the patent and make a product. The inventor gets money up front (before any units are sold!), and everyone is happy. The risk was shared (the inventor took the risk that the research won't get far enough to be patentable; the venture capitalist that there will be no product or that it will fail), and the same is true for the income. The capitalist moved moeny from the future to the present for the inventor, and this is also worth something. You should compare both the risk assumption and the financing issues of this scenario with the one where the inventor goes to the bank, gets a loan, and tries to develop and market the product himself.
Elsewhere, someone else is selling a product which infringes on the patents held by our inventor. He has no way of profiting from his past work on the invention unless he can effectuate the monopoly we promised him by suing the patent infringers. However, our inventor is not a lawyer. As in the case above, he probably doesn't have the capital to invest in a lawsuit. So one way for him to make money off his investment is to sell the patent to the lawyer. This way he gets the money up front, while the lawyer agrees to pay for the legal costs and takes the risk that the lawsuit will fail. That's no different from the case above.
Think of the transaction as follows: you want a lawyer to defend your patent, but you don't have the cash to pay the lawyer. You therefore pay the lawyer with the rights to the patent itself. Of course you expect the patent to be worth more than the laywer's fees, so the lawyer has to pay you back up front for the difference. Again compare this with the scenario where the inventor takes a loan to pay the lawyer. What happens if the lawsuit fails?
NTP has no interest in buying RIM or running a network of their own. They just want to get a piece of the action for doing basically nothing.
I do not think people claim that patents exist to increase the efficiency of the market. In fact, it could be very pursuasively argued that they lead to a less efficient market, at least for a short period of time.
Patents are granted for a similar reason to copyright: to promote the science and arts. How can creating inefficient monopolies do this, you ask? Easy: incentives. There are two important parts to the incentives that benefit society overall.
Let's say you're a business. You're reasonably sure that with $1.5 billion USD and 5 years of time you could have an AIDS vaccine. Most of the cost of these medicines is in the *research*, not the production of the actual serum. Without patent protection, once you have a serum, tens of companies around the world will analyze it and duplicate it in short time. They will undercut your price, since they don't have that $1.5B investment to pay off. As a result, businesses will not undertake such endeavors because market efficiency will make them unprofitable! Is that the world you want? Patents allow risky investments to pay off.
The other alternative is to attempt to keep all research & developments closely guarded secrets. Now, perhaps one medical company distributes the SARS vaccine, AIDS, and avian flu. Nobody else knows how the stuff works or how to produce it. Development as a whole in society slows because, if you want to make money, you can't share your scientific developments with anyone. Every company must invent the wheel over and over again, because they cannot work together. Is *that* the world you want? Patents induce monopolies to share their research.
In the former case, patents allow developing this $1.5B AIDS vaccine to make smart business sense because you *know* you'll earn it back. In the latter case, scientific progress as a whole in the world is improved because, once someone has that AIDS vaccine, they must publish a specification of how it works (that's the patent) in order to protect their business. Then, everyone else can learn from their techniques and perhaps a different group applies it to cancer.
That is a world I am happy with. Businesses may undertake science, earn profit from research, and everyone else learns their results and methods.
Now, whether the patent office is correctly granting patents is an entirely separate issue. Patents should be granted justly, not frivolously. But that does not mean the idea of patents is broken. Perhaps you may wish to suggest shorter patent lifespans, higher burden of proof, etc.
If you think patents are bad, just imagine what the trade secrets would look like if they weren't around. Getting in the door to Pfizer would be like crossing Checkpoint Charlie.
Companies wouldn't stop doing R&D, but they would close up all the doors and windows and try to hang on to their hard-won IP, tooth and nail. You probably wouldn't be able to get a job sweeping the floors or cleaning the fish tanks at any place that did anything significant without signing an NDA and a non-compete. Plus you'd have the heavy stick that are the penalties for de-valuing someone's trade secrets.
Unless your vision of a patentless world also includes provisions for a NDA-less world and a noncompete-less world, it's going to be one hell of an ugly place. And if you're planning on rewriting all of contract law (which is what you'd need, to get rid of non-competes and NDAs), then I'll take a little of whatever you're smoking, because it must be some great shit.
Software patents suck. I'll agree with that; whoever let that one go through should be run out of Washington on a rail. Business process patents suck. The whole concept of "you can patent anything" that seems to be in vogue at the USPTO, sucks. But the concept of patents itself isn't flawed, when considered in the context of our society -- it worked well for almost 200 years, and put the U.S. through a period of unrivaled discovery and scientific/engineering development. Without that, you would have had every major 20th century invention closeted up somewhere until its designer could figure out a way to "black box" it and protect their discovery. Patents give people an assurance that it's OK to publish an idea, because they'll be party to any money that gets made off of it, for a time. Otherwise they'd have to keep their invention secret until they'd personally tried every way they could think of to milk cash from it.
Sure, people made great works of art and invented things before patents. But the market was also a lot different back then -- you didn't have the stock market grinding up and spitting out companies that didn't perform well on a daily basis. Even then, though, there were more trade secrets than there were today; there are paintings and ceramics which even today can't be recreated, because the formulas used to create them were never published because of fear of competition. (One example.) History is full of dead-ends, many only discovered years or centuries later, of people who discovered things but sat on them for one reason or another.
A world without patents would be a pretty ugly place; it would be one where you'd probably never be quite sure what was in that pill you just swallowed or how the epoxied-shut black box on your desk worked. It would be one where joining a company was more like getting sworn in to the Freemasons, and industrial espionage would probably be perpetrated on a scale never before imagined.
There is simply no way that we can get rid of them, without completely rewriting our legal, economic, and probably also social systems. Anybody who says that patents can simply be made to 'go away' is living in a dreamland -- it's like wishing for money to go away, because you don't like being poor. It might fly in a college classroom, or other place equally insulated from the outside world (K5, Slashdot), but it has no value in real life.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
1. Insert standard slashdot spelling nazi bitchfest here
2. I hear lots of people say that patents are 'filed' (perhaps you mean flawed???) and need to be done away with. But I never hear anyone make a recommendation for a replacement. Patents serve an incredibly useful purpose in our economy - they are there to protect the investment required to develop intellectual property while still allowing its wide dissemination, at the same time making a provision for late-term royalty free use.
I agree that there are problems with the way patents are being handled. I do not agree that they are useless.
I challenge you and anyone else who says that patents should be abolished to suggest an alternative solution that would:
- Protect the investment of innovators, allowing them to market a product at a markup required to recoup their initial investment before cheap 'me-too' alternatives are released on the market
- Protect the interests of other businesses by providing a legal framework for licensing ideas to other entities
- Protect the interests of the public by ensuring that free market competition would eventually take place
- Protect the interests of humanity and the sciences by ensuring that the details of ideas are stored in a large public archive
Unless your solution solves all those needs, it's worse shit than the system we currently have. The problem with our current system is that there's no patent-challenge built-in; if you think that your product is a non-infringing invention, there's no way to vet that out other than build the damn thing and wait for your court summons.
Amazon's one-click patent is an excellent example. It was clearly a non-novel use with publicly available prior art, but they were granted the patent anyways. Noone can take them to court to challenge the patent's legitimacy - they have to take you to court. And until then the sword of damoscles hangs over the heads of all e-commerce sites that utilize streamlined checkout processes.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
There are really only two other Enterprise solutions for wireless e-mail. One is a Good Link server and a compatible mobile device running a Good Link client (PPC, Palm or a BB). The other is an Exchange 2003 SP2 server and Windows Mobile 5 device.
Does either of them offer the same ' always-up-to-date' push feature for E-Mail that RIM+Blackberry does? The last time I looked Exchange didn't offer push service but even so Exchange+WindowsMobile still doesa an admirable job at keeping me connected, even on VPN connections over GPRS. Push e-mail is the main attraction of the RIM setup. Not that I want to trash start a flamewar by trashing RIM, Blackberry seems to have gathered a religious following in some quarters, but a determined and innovative competitor could do alot better.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
"I sure prefer my laws to be written by those educated/skilled in law (lawyers)."
This results in laws written in "lawyer" and in many cases requiring a lawyer to interpret. I don't see how laws written by educated people could be worse. Laws should be understood by most people. There are cases where laws have to complex but relatively few.
Yes - your post is quite informative and it does illustrate how futile the patent process is. Prior examples of this would include Philo Farnsworth VS RCA.
If as you state the NTP patents were legit - then we have the issue that there is no justice and the inventor only found a way to waste money on lawyers and legal fees. Often this is the major outcome of a civil case. Theives know this and white collar crime is rampant because they know this. If you take them to court you might win something back - and in the interm they get to use your money to fight against you. If they lose - the have to pay some of that money back to you.
In the Farnsworth litigation - this would be pretty close to the situation. Farnsworth would have been better off building better products and focusing on marketing. But then - isn't this what Sony is so good at? We have similar patent issues in this area.
So if it turns out that the NTP patents are in fact valid then we see RIM as the black hat - and they are the ones with the product and the marketing. Thus like Sony and RCA they should be expected to come out as a winner - regardless of the litigation.
But - are the NTP patents valid? I say they are perfectly obvious. Back before 1985 I was using fido-net systems and there were some running over packet radio. My neighbour across the street ran packet radio back then.
To send an email over a packetized transmission system is perfectly obvious to _anyone_ who thinks about this for a moment.
It doesn't even require a practitioner of the field. Even a retard would think of this.
In slash-dot if we go back there are even stories of packet passenger pigeon systems. Yes - they will work! Does this mean the NTP patents are so obvious they are for the birds? Even a pigeon can do it...
If there were _something_ innovative in viewing emails over a wireless system then sure - they might have a valid claim. But consider.
During the 70's I read many articals about how NASA communicated from their deep space probes. The communications were innovative. In some cases they did a fourier transform and spread the bits out in order to lose the noise.
Do we have something like this here? How a BlackBerry communicates might actually be innovative. That it can communicate is not innovative. Also what a user might choose to send over that communications channel is not innovative.
A user for instance might call his mom to wish her happy birthday. Should this be subject to a patent restriction? If so - what if he calls his dad. Now calling his wife might be of course since it is common knowledge among all wives that their husbands forget their birthdays. haha!
That the USA courts upheld this claim illustrates that the court to a large extend is not capable of establishing a fundamental tennant of patent law - that is: the "invention" must actually _BE_ an invention - ie - it must be innovative.
This also illustrates that the primary effect (if not also its purpose) of a patent is to encourage litigation. This would put the legislation clearly in the area of a restraint on trade - which is what it really is and should be seen as.
As a restraint on trade it is not much different than what the USA has done in many areas and that includes ignoring the NAFTA agreements in the area of softwood lumber.
There are many areas this has happened in. With RIM it just turns out that a Canadian company is involved. While this does add more weight to the idea of protectionism in another guise - we are still left with the observation that were RIM an American company - we would still be left with the same issues. Patent law's primary effect is to encourage litigation. This is good for the [legal] business.
When we look at patent law from this perspective then we have to realise that if we complain to the legal community we will receive lip service at best because everyone in that business knows what this is all about - its about generating fees from clients... big fees. We _also_ have to realise that the legal community includes the pollies.