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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.
RIM has already stated that they have a technology workaround that does not infringe the "patents." When the injunction comes down, they'll patch the software and go about their merry business. NTP will make another motion, and it will be boxed around by the courts for a few more years. Hopefully, by which time, the USPTO will invalidate the bogus patents upon which NTP bases their claims.
[ashamed]
Perhaps it would be bad time to ask for a RIM job.
*rimshot*
[/ashamed]
And they said zombies weren't real!
They can have my Blackberry when they pry it from my cold, dead hands. I think I'm getting Blackberry thumb so I hope that's soon. Ouch... It hurts.
Firefox 2.0 - Spell Rightly.
What are the alternatives to the BlackBerry?
And I don't mean "roll your own" setups, but full fledged enterprise level products.
RIM can't be the only company that offers such a service.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.
I don't understand why NTP has a case at all. I thought the USPTO announced that it would rule against NTP's patents.
m -to-give-support/
http://www.engadget.com/2005/12/20/uspto-calls-ri
I believe that the USPTO hasn't ruled yet, but given that they've announced that they will rule in favor of RIM, I don't know how NTP could enforce an injuction against RIM.
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
that this actually could kill RIM.
The potential impact of this may mean the shutdown of Blackberry's network.
Surely this would not mean that the Blackberry network would be shutdown? Am I naive to think that this would instead mean that RIM's value would decend constantly, nobody would want to buy them EXCEPT for NTP, who would buy them at rock bottom prices and then aquire the network and most importantly the customer base (ie. high pressure money pipe) which goes with it?
"The" law seems to be grossly manipulated by good actors (plaintiffs, lawyers, attorneys, barristers, witnesses, etc) who work it for nothing but money. It seems that rather than seeing themselves needing to defend their property, they instead see opportunity to take someone elses "in the name of defending their own".
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
I used to work in electronics retail in Vancouver. Rogers launched RIM service back in 1997 (I think it was 1997) and all managers were given demo RIM units to use. It became quite common among managers to jokingly ask each other to "RIM me". The Rogers area sales reps were not happy when that term caught on around work. They though it was "disrpectful". Whatever. It was funny to hear one manager yell to another manager, "RIM me with the inventory levels on [insert product], will you?" Ah, the good old days of retail.
Surely that should be metha-phone?
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
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.
That joke was in bad taste.
br Ayohhhh!
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
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.
'nuff said.
www.good.com
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...
What exactly is the Blackberry service? What does this mean for Sprint/Nextel customers?
Many folks in my office have Blackberry phones with the Nextel 2-way service, but our service is provided through Nextel. As far as I know, we are billed directly by Nextel and don't have a "Blackberry service", which leads me to believe that the Blackberry service in question here isn't exactly what I think it is.
Long signatures suck.
or the headline woulda read:
Supreme Court spurns RIM, Jobs
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.
05-763 RESEARCH IN MOTION, LTD. V. NTP, INC. The motion of Intel Corporation for leave to file a brief as amicus curiae is granted. The motion of Canadian Chamber of Commerce, et al. for leave to file a brief as amici curiae is granted. The motion of Government of Canada for leave to file a brief as amicus curiae is granted. The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
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?
Yes, read the fucking articles about this particular case, my dear little retarded friend.
NTP is not a patent buying outfit - it was founded by an engineer who
actually built and demonstrated techology prototypes back in 80's and early 90's.
He died of cancer last year.
If you, my little moron, work on something for 5 years, build some prototype technology, patent it and then something bad happens to you, e.g. you get cancer and die, do you want some large corporation just start using your patented technology for free, just because you are sick and cannot build it yourself on scale ?
Think about it for a while, my little slashdot moron !
There are plenty of alternatives.
If you want something that "just works", get a Danger Hiptop from T-Mobile: it's cheaper and a lot nicer than the Blackberry ever was.
Otherwise, the Palm Treos are the obvious choice. Use IMAP for mail, with the new mail notification extension and you get all the Blackberry features and a lot more.
Finally, the Nokia communicators look nice, although I haven't used one regularly. The bluetooth-only model looked like a nice compromise between power and size; there'll probably be an updated version soon that gives you 802.11 in the small form factor as well. Again, IMAP is the way to go for mail.
However, there is an exception, called the Federal Tort Claims Act, which allows people to sue the Government for negligence in some situations:
The Government would have a pretty easy argument in this case that the USPTO's function is "uniquely governmental" in that it enforces a duty of the Government that's enumerated in the Constitution (that whole "useful arts" bit that always gets dragged up). Whether or not they do their job well doesn't enter into it -- the intended method of influencing the Government's performance is through the ballot box, not the jury box.
This is also the reason why you can't sue the Government if you were wrongly accused of murder and held in prison for 20 years before being exonerated by DNA evidence or something. The Government was doing its job (however poorly), therefore you can't sue it/them.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
In my case, I really hate these sorts of patents, this is why I would really love to see this case made into an example of the evil in the current system. In order to make this RIM-NTP situation into an example, RIM is going to have to be forced to shut down and cause pain to a number of people. If enough pain is caused to the right people somebody in power just might realize that there is a problem.
Too bad. I think RIM has a case given that their servers are ex-USA. Of course, the USA too often thinks it owns the whole world when it comes to patent and copyright enforcement -- and I'm a USA citizen saying this.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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."
Short answer, no. You basically cannot sue the Government or a Government agency directly. It has soverign immunity under the Constitution from most civil suits.
wow, thank you.
I find that utterly amazing. Up here in in the Great White North (Canada) people can and do sue the government. There have been several wrongful murder convictions and there was the whole Native schools thing for which the federal government did have to deliver financial compensation.
I am generally critical about the Americans predisposition to sue. However, not being able to sue an authority which misused it's power, (however well intentioned) is quite scary.
Considering the purpose of tort law (as I understand it) is to compensate for injustice, not to punish, I think it shows yet another way in which Americans are less free than other democracies. Their Government is actually allowed to abuse its own people.
millions of weary thumbs rejoice...
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
I detect a largely pro-RIM, anti-NTP crowd here. There are a lot of misconceptions being touted on this board, which makes me think few of you have actually bothered to look at the facts...
First, as far as I can tell, the NTP patents are valid. The original inventor Thomas Campana did, indeed invent and demonstrate the first wireless email solution. Campana built prototypes to demonstrate the proof-of-concept and filed for and received patents. He did everything he was supposed to do, from a patent perspective. He was unable to market-ize the solution because there was not sufficient infrastructure, at the time, to support a market. Campana notified a number of companies, including RIM that he held the patents on the invention and was looking for support to product-ize.
RIM, like most companies, ignored this notification. Unlike most others, RIM went on to build a product based on Campana's invention and then refused to pay him royalties. Campana started to try and litigate, however he didn't have enough money or energy because he was suffering from cancer. He co-founded NTP with a lawyer friend to follow through with the litigation.
The reason that the US patent office is reconsidering the patents has nothing to do with the validity of the patents and everything to do with political pressure from the Canadian and US governments, as well as a number of large corporate investors that have a lot to lose. Politics!
Campana has already lost. He died of cancer, never receiving the monies or credit that he was due.
NTP continues to fight the battle as a matter of principle. The are not simply some law firm trying to get rich off of someone else's ideas. They are trying to force RIM to do the right thing and to send out a warning that being big doesn't entitle a company to steal.
People are so eager to believe that it's always the lawyers that that are evil. Unfortunately, in our zeal to blame the lawyers, we sometimes find ourselves on the wrong side of the fight! Sometimes the lawyers do fight real injustices.
ps
I'm not a lawyer - I'm an engineer, so my bias is in favor of Thomas Campana and anyone wanting to protect their original inventions!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Not if the whole point of inventing the machine was to sell it for profit.
and maybe even a "first mover" advantage if you run a company
If you go bankrupt because your neighbor watches you from his window and then sells an identical device for 1/2 the cost, that first mover advantage doesn't mean anything, and would very likely be an advantage of less than one day.
Not a global monopoly who locks everyone else out
That's not the purpose of a patent. The purpose is to convince the guy in his garage that he will be able to recoup the R&D costs, so that he will share it with the public. Patents were supposed to be reasonably short lived, so that an inventor would actually have to keep inventing to make a living from it.
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.
You're far too naieve about the honesty and ethics of corporate executives. The problem isn't the institution of patents, it's the implementation. The two problems are the length of patents, and the lax attitude that patent examiners have for granting patents. A patent should be difficult to get, only for something truly new and unique and very specific. Not for adding "on the internet" to a business method that's been in use for decades. You should also be required to actually build and distribute the invention. Also, if patents were only valid up until the point where the inventor had recouped their documented R&D costs, that would alleviate most of the problems.
Take pharmaceuticals as an example industry. The medicines developped are necessary and beneficial to the public interest. They take billions of dollars to develop. Who's going to pay for that if they can't recoup the costs? It would have to be a government subsidized program. I don't believe socialized medical research produces the same quality as what we get with private industry. So you offer a limited monopoly to recoup the costs, and once that has happened the information becomes public domain and everybody gets the benefit not only the medecines, but the reduced cost resulting from a competetive free market.
Make no mistake, I'm not saying what we currently have in place for patents is a good system. But it could be with some significant changes.
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?!
To make your points for you, I'll take a closer look at the case of NTP. In principle, they are fulfulling an important economic function: buying obscure patents and filing infringement lawsuits based on them make them money, but also makes money for the inventors from whom the patents were bought (who probably can't afford to sue RIM!). Also, there's strength in numbers -- and it's possible that NTP bought patents from several inventors, who probably won't have filed suit together otherwise.
The reason this feels wrong to you (and me) is that it's likely that NTP paid the inventors much less that what they are about to make from the lawsuit. This says nothing about NTP (who are simply trying to profit from the system as much as possible), but tell us a lot about the system. What this tell us is that the most important ingredient in the lawsuit was provided by NTP, or in other words, that you can lawyering $100m out of a patent is easier than developing a product worth $100m from it. In my opinion this comes from two deplorable problems in the USA:
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
An important thing to remember is that the patent system is supposed to promote innovation. The USPTO's case against NTP so far pretty much demonstrates that Campana wasn't the first person to come up with the "inventions" claimed in his patents. A good synopsis of the evidence can be found on the discussion page of the blackberry entry in wikipedia. Here is an excerpt:
"During reexaminations, the USPTO built detailed cases against NTP patent claims developed largely from information contained in other U.S. patents. The USPTO found that U.S. patent 5,159,592 by inventor Charles E. Perkins, assigned to IBM, anticipated many claims in the NTP patents and was filed earlier than any of them. NTP has apparently been unable to show to the satisfaction of the USPTO that its inventions were documented or demonstrated before the Perkins patent held by IBM was filed.
The October 26, 1990, date claimed for ESA's [the prior owner of NTP's patents] demonstration to AT&T could be significant, because the Perkins patent application was filed October 29, 1990. However, according to the Telefind memo, what was demonstrated then was a "wireless modem to download data and messages" and not the more complex system of e-mail processing and routing that is described in the patents under review.
U.S. patent 5,278,955 deals with e-mail processing and cites an article from 1989 by Richard D. Verjinski entitled, "PHASE, a portable host access system environment," published in an IEEE proceedings. The USPTO found Verjinski's article anticipated many NTP patent claims.
Besides the Perkins patent and the Verjinski article, the USPTO found several other prior publications describing techniques claimed in NTP patents, including a RIM patent and documents published by Norwegian Telecommunications in 1986 and 1989. For many of the NTP patent claims it now proposes to reject the USPTO cites multiple prior disclosures.
Until recent years U.S. patent applications were not published. NTP inventors would have been unable to learn about the Perkins patent application when they applied for the first three of the eight patents now being reexamined. However, the Verjinski article was published before any NTP patent application, and the Perkins patent had been published before applications for the last five NTP patents were filed.
The USPTO has assembled substantial evidence that critical NTP patent claims are invalid. Despite persistent attempts by RIM to intervene in the reexaminations, the USPTO has generally built its own cases without accepting arguments advanced by RIM. So far the USPTO has not explained why the NTP claims now being rejected were instead accepted when the NTP patent applications were originally examined.
NTP has made some adjustments in response to the USPTO findings but is attempting to justify and maintain most if not all of its claims. If the USPTO follows through with final actions rejecting any claims not conceded or adjusted by NTP, NTP has available to it both administrative and court appeals, likely to take many years."
"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.
"No they wouldn't! that's the point. There are better ways to collaberate on R&D without multi billion dollar venture investments.
Like what? If you ask me (or anybody else) to invest in a project, you've got to be able to show me how you're going to get a return. For products (like pharmaceuticals and software) where the cost of the first product (pill or CD) is very high, but the cost of the 2nd through nth is virtually zero, you've got to have some way of giving the people who invest the upfront capital to develop the product the chance to earn a return on that product.
Patents ain't perfect, by any means, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a need for a way to provide incentives to investors.
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.