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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.
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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.
The judge actually stated that he will uphold the USPTO's CURRENT position. He is only interested in enforcing the patent, not determining it's validity. That's probably why RIM hasn't settled this already. They want to drag it out in the hope that the USPTO will actually invalidate NTP's patents sometime in the near future.
This whole case is an amazing example of bureaucracy at 'work'.
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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.
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?
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.
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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.
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millions of weary thumbs rejoice...
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
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."