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RIM - The Whole Story
khendron writes "The Globe and Mail has published an article titled Patently Absurd, detailing the whole history of the RIM vs. NTP wireless war. It is a blow by blow account of how a dispute that could have been settled for a few million dollars is now 'a billion-dollar dagger hanging over RIM.' The article reads like a fairy-tale of egos, legal blunders, and patent stupidity."
Brief summary:
Rim used to be the bastard. NTP is the bastard. Lawyers changed brilliant inventors into agressive beasts.
Conclusion:
the US patent system is bad for the US economy and bad for your ego.
I can tell you I've been at several places and NONE of them have really concerned themselves with infringing on others' patents. The common rebuttal is that "we have patents too, and I'm sure we can find them [other company] infringing on ours somehow. Hence, we can "strike a deal" if a problem ever comes up.
Jerry
http://www.networkstrike.com/
In the 80's and 90's IBM service reps ran around with something they called a "brick" which was a wireless device that they used to communicate with the main office, wouldn't that be prior art for RIM and NTP?
More importantly, if RIM was going after all of these other companies, then it was hardly "novel", right?
Neither company deserves a patent in this case (which appears to be the case with about 98% of all software patents).
While you are partially right in that the two are an obvious combination, there is a bit
more to RIM than simply using pop over wireless. The cost of constant connections
to check you mail would drain the battery in short order. It closer to what happens
in SMS. When the server receives new email for you, it actively sends out a message
through the wireless network to your device which is most likely in standby mode
(like a cellular phone). That makes your device notify you that you have email. It
is not a TCP/IP connection.
I'm glossing over many of the details. I went to a RIM presentation at a conference 1.5
years ago, and the details are a bit fuzzy. I don't agree with software patents in the
first place, so a pox on both houses. But there is a bit more happening than tcp over
general wireless network.
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
Microsoft will end up the winner. Outlook mobile access on Windows mobile version 5. We just got a quote from our vendor to replace our 156 Blackberries with IPAQ's using OMA. We'll only exercise this option if forced to. But MS would be the clear winner.
One must always question - is it really worth the effort to file a patent. If the patent is refused - is the filing still valid as "prior art" and therefore sufficient to be able to avoid others to claim a patent and then kick you out of the market?
The majority of patents are not worth the cost of preparing and filing the application. The minority of patents are worth modest fortunes, and sometimes more. The problem is determining the difference between the former and the latter. It's educated guesswork.
Patent applications do not necessarily become prior art. Before November of 2000, U.S. patent applications were not published as a matter of course. The content of a patent application only became public if a later patent or a printed publication made the public aware of the abandoned application's existence. If the document is not accessible to the interested public, it is not prior art. Even after November of 2000, a U.S. patent application can be withheld from publication if the inventor certifies that they have not and will not file an application in any patent office that has an 18 month publication rule (the current standard).
That being said, if you want to prevent others from patenting your idea, whether or not you intend to patent it, all you have to do is publish the idea in a way that's accessible to the public. This is phenomenally easy to do when you consider the existence of Google and the internet. Make sure that the document can be indexed by search engines, and include a precise publication date (not "2004"), and you've overcome most of the barriers that would prevent an examiner or attorney from using your publication as prior art against an application or patent.
Of course, if you intend to patent an invention described in that document, especially in countries outside the U.S., you would be well advised to publish your idea only after you've filed the application(s)...
Not really, xbiff is just a process that does periodic checker and changes
its icon. That is exactly what they don't do. The server sends out a message
through the network to a device that is on standby, just like a cell system
sends out a message to a phone that is on standby. The innovation is in
the details of the network handling, which is not a simple TCP/IP connection
over wireless.
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
Well, it does seem to make them upset: "I don't like seeing NTP referred to as a patent troll company," says Tom Campana III, Mr. Campana's son. "I take it personally." Of course, a big payout will make them feel better. I hope they don't get it.
I don't think that RIM has acted in anything but self-interest, but the Campanas are being ridiculous. RIM came up with a product that actually works, while NTP has nothing to offer except a bunch of old patents. They aren't actively developing them; they're sitting on them until someone else comes up with something similar, and then they sue. They have no redeeming value. It's too bad.
In my opinion, if you're not going to use something that you've patented, then you should have no right to stop someone else from developing it, especially if the other party seems to have come up with the idea independently. The idea behind patents is to let the inventor develop their product without competition for a limited amount of time. If the inventor isn't developing it, it's not in anyone's interest to let them stop others from doing so.
Indeed. But if you read the article, you would learn that it wasn't the beaners that fucked this one up-- it was the founder of RIM, a technical guy.
hey RIMboi - read the friggin article. It says Campana designed and operated working message/pager system. Whether is was a huge commercial success is not an issue. The facts are that he did get a perfectly legal pattent on. The courts can only work with the facts and the law.
"He was not the greatest businessman in the world," Mr. Campana Sr. concedes. "Even when his business was going broke his employees never missed a day's pay. He went home without paying himself."
Mean while RIM in Nov. of 2002, to meet the finacial quota, layoffs followed;
http://news.techdirt.com/news/wireless/article/824
To be more balanced, here is the timeline on RIM vs NTP stories/posts;
http://news.techdirt.com/news/wireless/search?quer y=RIM&topic=&author=
I am not defending NTP or RIM, however this seems awfully a lot like history being repeated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philo_Farnsworth (Father of TV)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Howard_Armstron g (Father of FM radio)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Meucci (Father of Telephone)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Boole (Father of Digital Age)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Diesel (Father of Internal Combustion Engine)
All died with tregic end, without entitlement or recognition or compensation for their life's work while they were alive, only to be stolen and profited by thieves and corrupt hands of greed.
This may sound naive and to some "slashdotters," idiotic, but I value true human story in history more so than the profit margin or success of marketing and public opinion. The truth is, Mr. Stout and Campana are robbed from their rightful entitlement as Mr. Stout successfully demonstrated his idea through practical usage and only to be failed as business venture later on. This does not mean that Mr. Lazaridis didn't have any valuable input for this technology. However as patent is to protect the legitimacy of an idea, our legal system should validate that entitlement, not manipulate and craft to falsify the technical validity of original idea of the inventor.
I don't personally care for how many lines of code are there, regardless if it's 16 million lines or 16 billion lines to make BlackBerry work flawlessly. This patent isn't about who has how many lines of code or how much work has been put in or how much money it made or how important it is on fight against "terrorist." It's about the innovative idea and technology.
Other point is that often people are too quick to judge that patent itself is wrong, however without patent, non-profit driven, non-corporate endorced, average inventors and innovators of technology become faceless, only to be digged up later to be found in history book as many Open Source developers and programmers may face later.
Or are we all that naive that one day, giant corporations and investers will dig up the holder of the original idea their proprietary software/technology benefited from in oder to share the profit and entitlement? Will FOSS and GPL ever have enough backbone or teeth to enforce its ideal and fight legal battles against billion dollar corporations'?
What if Farnsworth became billionaire with his invention, what change could we have seen in today's TV broadcasting? What if Armstrong could have made his FM radio available to millions, what different sound could we hear over the radio today? What if Meucci and not Bell profitted from telephone, what could have happen for today's telecommuncation industry? What if Boole's idea was taken seriously and valued as later Claude Elwood Shannon, nearly 70 years later, found it to be, what could we have accomplished in today's computing industry? What if Rudolf Diesel was alive and prospected as Ford, could we have seen cars running on vegetable oil mor
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
This is just so F8ing stupid. I was in Dallas in 1985 and I dumped printouts in Alaska from Sun Oil's office (I had the routing codes wrong). This was on the IBM mainframe system.
Over 5 years before Lynes United Services in Calgary (who I worked for at the time) sent wireless messages. We didn't call it an "email" at the time but we did send messages. The company was working on oil field monitoring.
We had systems working back then.
In addition I personally used the Fidonet system here in Calgary and it had wireless packet radio and we did send messages back and forth - that was the 1985 time frame.
How much F8ing prior art do we need?
The PHONE COMPANY commonly ran wireless communcations on their ATM system because they have had wireless links in place for DECADES
------------
All this illustrates is that lawyers and juries and Judges do not make good engineers. What we have here is totally f8ing obvious!
Huge amounts of the telecomunications industry were doing wireless transmissions in many different ways. That email caught on and ran on existing technologies does not make it innovative in any way.
Arrgghhhh!
Mod parent down as troll/flamebait. They failed to provide any credentials, here's mine:
I live in Kitchener. I graduated from U(W). I am employed in a small tech firm owned by a U(W) grad. None of the U(W) people I know, including several who work at RIM, have the attitude the parent poster claims we do.
...Stu
You're joking right? Read the article before posting junk like this.
Here's a summary:
NTP, started by Campana. Campana did some work in Telecom but left to form NTP with Stout (a lawyer). Here's the key argument that NTP are "litigating bastards"
The company was never about making things or selling things. It was about protecting potentially valuable ideas, some of which dealt with sending messages to wireless devices. And for nearly a decade, Mr. Campana's patents lay dormant, just waiting for RIM to produce the BlackBerry
RIM on the other hand:
Was started by Lazaridis after he dropped out of Univerity of Waterloo. Funded by $600K from GM. RIM spent years researching and creating products and winning many awards for their technial achievements (including an Academy award). RIM entered into the mainstream wireless market when contracted by Cantel (now part of Rogers communications).
RIM's patent litigation case vs Handspring was small relative to the kind of $$ they put into developing the blackberry. The patent dealt specifically with the layout and the shape of the handheld device. You might notice that only RIM devices have the curved edge under the QWERTY keypads. The key is that RIM did the research and is trying to protect their product.