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Last NTP Patent Tentatively Thrown Out
pcause writes "Reuters reports that the fifth NTP patent has been rejected. What does it say about the US Patent office and software patents that these patents have made it through trials, appeals, etc and only now has the Patent Office decided they weren't any good in the first place?" From the article: "The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has sided with BlackBerry portable e-mail device maker Research in Motion Ltd. by issuing a non-final rejection of a fifth patent at the center of its legal battle with patent holding company NTP Inc. The decision means the patent agency has now issued non-final rejections of all five patents at issue in a BlackBerry patent-infringement case before a federal judge."
They started this patent war, they were the ones who were suing a bunch of smaller firms doing the same thing as RIM, that's why the late Thomas Campana even started his lawsuit on the first place - he saw a newspaper article about RIM suing other firms for patent infringements, the same sort of patents NTP was sitting on.
You can't handle the truth.
There was an article - I believe in the Wall Street Journal - about these patents being rejected within the last week. The USPTO only does a very minimal prior art search during the initial application process because there is just too much data to dig through in order to complete an exhaustive search for prior art. Once the patent is issued, if a patent disput arises, then normally the two sides of the dispute will provide additional information to the USPTO that supports their side of the argument. In this instance, RIM was able to find prior art in Europe that pre-dated NTP's patent applications by a year, or so. This prior art was the basis for the non-final rejections that have been recently returned by the USPTO.
Five Dolla Moddy-Moddy?
The above article also indicates that other patents held by InPro where overturned by German and UK officials in the last week.
You sly dog: you got me monologuing! - Syndrome
The patents here have already been scrutinized by a district court and upheld as valid and infringed.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the district court specifically DOES NOT have any say on whether or not a patent is valid (they can only rely on the patents current status with the USPO. So the the USPO has granted a valid patent, the court doesn't do any scrutinizing on whether its valid or not, it just decides if it was infringed upon. The courts must rule based on the assumption the patent is valid cause it just ain't thier job to decide either way.
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
As easy as it is for me to want to side with RIM, and be excited that this last patent was thrown out...
That isn't the case. The USPTO, on its own motion, placed these patents through a process called reexamination, in which each patent claim allowed is subject to review for subtantial new questions of patentability not previously considered by the office. So an examiner takes a new bite at the apple, based on new prior art, and reexamines te claims in view of the new art.
All that happened here, is that what is called an "iniitial official action" was issued, laying out the examiner's case that there existed new prior art that could invalidate the patent. First action rejection of all claims, which didn't happen in this case, is ROUTINE in ALMOST EVERY patent examination, and rarely indicates that the patent claims are in doubt. The next step is that the applicant files a response, either defending the claims as originally allowed, or introducing amendments or amended claims and defending them. It is then ROUTINE in MOST applications, that some or all patent claims are allowed to issue, either as originally filed or with some amendments.
So, if a single claim of a single patent survives unscathed, or allowed and amended claims are narrower but still infringed, nothing gets better for RIM.
The fact of initial rejections indicate nothing -- it is just another point of leverage for a settlement negotiation.
This is not the first time this has been pointed out in these letters.
But, in the tail end is this little note:
So some work was really done to justify this patent as an invention.