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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."
Alternative title: Rim - The hole story
Starring goatse?
Nahhhh no puns
liqbase
I got this from a waitress friend of mine...
A lot of times, people come into the restaruant she works in and while she's trying to take their order and ask them things like: "What kind of dressing do you want, what do you want to drink, etc...", they'll be looking at their crackberry and findling with the butons. Of course, they're asking her to repeat what she said and thy always get pissed when their order isn't what they thought they asked for. So, to make their rudness fun, while she's (other waitresses are doing this, too) taking their order, she'll interject a "meow", as in a cat's meow. The contest amoung the waitresses is to see how many "meows" they can say to the crackberryheads before they say "excuse me?". It's really fun to watch!
Except the idea behind patents is to protect innovation. I'm sure you've thought of a good number of things that would be great if patented, researched and marketed. The problem here is the researching and marketing. NTP has no product.
The blackberry is running on top of 18 million lines of code. How much code did NTP write? The blackberry is a physical piece of hardware I can hold. What can I buy from NTP with the same functionality?
NTP put in exactly zero work in their patent. Someone had a good idea, patented it, and then sat on it, waiting for someone else to actually MAKE IT WORK. That is not, or at least should not, be the foundation of the patent system. At this point there's plenty of options...save the patent so it can be researched while protected, I'd tentativly agree with that, maybe a 4 year limit and at least show some progress. (In NTP's case, they could've had a 15 year limit and not make product). Only issue a patent when there's a tangible device to go along with it, that's ideal.
I suppose, though, that they do have the patent, so they should get some recourse. I imagine that the best way would be to have RIM pick up NTP's R&D costs which amount to... the cost of filing a patent.
Seriously though, should I be able to file a patent for warp drive and just sit on it until someone actually does the grunt work and makes it...and then sue them back to the stone age? If you can answer yes to that without flinching...I fear for the fate of this nation.
Personally I feel companies that buy and sell patents as if they're some kind of property are a disgrace to everything the patent and trademark system was founded to uphold. They're not using the patents to innovate, they're just using the patents to extort money out of other companies. NTP should have all its patents stripped because it's quite clear they're nothing but a patent squatter.
Ironic, isn't it, that the patent system is becoming increasingly burdensome for exactly the people the system was originally intended to protect (the "small guy"). The cost of acquiring a patent is on the order thousands of dollars ($5,000 - $10,000, depending on your lawyer), which you have to be willing to spend without knowing if the patent which you receive actually has any value. It may be invalidated later (being granted is *not* a good measure of whether or not prior art exists) or simply not be useful.
More damagingly, though, a patent is useless if it can't be defended and defending one's patents is becoming horrifically expensive to the point that the winner is most likely to be the "big guy", and the "small guy" loses out.
Have fun,
Nathan 'Nato' Uno
http://web.unos.net/
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"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."
Ummmmm no, the moral is: "Don't get caught".
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.