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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."
As easy as it is for me to want to side with RIM, and be excited that this last patent was thrown out...
I'd like to know several things. First, what WAS the last patent? The article doesn't say - I'm sure someone could dig it up, though. Also, why was it rejected, and if there was good cause to reject it, why did it survive so much previous scrutiny? While the USPTO will accept almost anything at first - they don't do rigorous review of everything submitted, until it is challenged - they start scrutinizing them once court cases come up. So how did it survive previously if it could not survive now? Could this perhaps be only a political decision? The USPTO bowing to administration pressure?
-Daniel
They all have a crackberry.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
It means that those government employees, all the way up to the Congress, who were worried about their Blackberry service made some calls to some people in the Patent Office.
The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.
Well, it kinds of throws the supreme value of having the government as a client into sharp relief, doesn't it?
It's about time these patents were thrown out, although I would have preferred a court ruling that said patent law does not extend beyond the US border. I may love my country, but that doesn't mean I think they're always right.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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.
I was just getting ready to photoshop a picture of Heston with a blackberry: "Not from my cold dead hands". Guess I don't need to now.
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?
It says that the USPTO has and will continue to issue bullshit patents on anything put in front of them, but that when a patent affects 25% of the government, regardless of validity, they will toss it out so they don't risk actual reform. No need to fret, however, any bullshit patents that only act as a cudgel for big businesses to kill or blackmail small businesses will remain inviolate.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
This is just one step in a grand conspiracy by those sneaky canucks to take over the word.
I for one welcome our touque wearing overlords.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
"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?"
This is a political decision, but related more to the US Senate/House than to the administration. I have been waiting for the politicos to stuff this one, and as the deadline for RIM drew near, they are doing so.
Now we can just hope that this has an effect on the USPTO beyond just the RIM case, extending to the other questionable patents they have approved...
Using plain ol' text since 1968
This action by the USPTO will have HUGE implications for anyone that has a patent on anything.
A patent is supposed to secure, for a limited time, exclusive use of the patented item for the inventor. What the USPTO has effectively done here is said:
"We rubber stamp almost everything. You shouldn't build a business on a patent until it has been tried in the courts."
Of course, most patents will not be tried in courts until there is money (and a big business) at stake....catch 22.
A patent is supposed to be a guarantee - the due diligence should have been done before the patent was granted. Now, no business based on a patent has any reason to believe that their business is safe, or that they will recoup the costs of their investment until the courts decide so.
The patents granted by the USPTO are effectively paper tigers and not worthy of investment trust.
-ted
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?
It means that 20 Senators, 100 Congressmen, and 1000 federal judges, along with Tommy Lee Jones in a US Marshall's uniform, called upon the USPTO and told them that they could either find a way to invalidate the patents or they could all find themselves drafted under secret provisions of various secret laws and assigned as the US Navy's designated patent examiners at the secret underground Antarctic base for the rest of their lives, with no vacation time or days off. And no funeral; their bodies would just be tossed out for leapord seals to eat sometime around 2030.
And believe me, that was probably the only true BIPARTISAN delegation Washington DC has seen in 13 years.
sPh
What exactly did the little guy invent? Delivery of email via radio waves? Was a protocol designed? Distribution system designed?
...richie - It is a good day to code.
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?
Wouldn't it have been easier to just disallow patenting this in the *first* place?
The five patents are 5,625,670, 5,631,946, 5,819,172,
6,067,451,
and 6,317,592.
Let's take a look at the first of these patents:
1. A system for transmitting information from one of a plurality of originating processors contained in an electronic mail system to at least one of a plurality of destination processors contained in an electronic mail system with the information including originated information originating from one of the plurality of originating processors and being transmitted by an RF information transmission network to at least one of the plurality of destination processors and other originated information originating from one of the originating processors is transmitted with the electronic mail system without using the RF information transmission network to at least one of the destination processors comprising:
at least one interface, one of the at least one interface connecting the electronic mail system containing the plurality of originating processors to the RF information transmission network; and wherein
the originated information is transmitted in association with an address of the one interface from the one of the plurality of originating processors to the one interface with the electronic mail system responding to the address of the one interface to direct the originated information from the one of the plurality of originating processors to the one interface; and
the originated information is transmitted from the one of the at least one interface to the RF information transmission network with an address of the at least one of the plurality of destination processors to receive the originated information being added at the originating processor originating the originated information, or by either the electronic mail system that contains the plurality of originating processors or the one interface.
So, basically, written as confusingly as possible, these turkeys have filed for a patent that covers any email system in which some information is sent via RF and some is not and the devices involved have addresses. The last is pretty much a given, and the first is pretty straightforward.
I'm serious. Advances in device development simply do not require patents. This is stupid. Why should anyone be granted a monopoly over this? Why does the production of RF devices require a patent at all? Say I'm an engineer. I want to send email from a mobile computer (hardly a stretch to envision). So I select a data transmission medium. Well, there's RF, IR, etc. These all have different properties. I choose the one that is most appropriate -- RF.
Yes, this patent got thrown out, but what I'm saying is that this is not a field in which patents -- guaranteed, time-limited government monopolies -- are necessary to produce advancements. The lifecycle of a new device is mayb
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Non-Final - Hmmm...remember the FAT patent that MS got? It was rejected at this stage, but later upheld in the "FINAL" review. (FAT - File Allocation Table as invented by Gary Kildal in CP/M (or maybe even earlier than that???))
So if experience is a teacher here, then this means nothing.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
I guess if the IRS came up with "One Click" tax returns Amazon's patent would have to be removed.
At least the US Gov. could have been a little more transparent about it.
"Go back to bed America, You are free to do what we tell you"
Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion, you must set yourself on fire.
All of those points are moot unless they are backed up by changes in the law. To rely on policy instead of force of law is a recipe for further political manipulation. All patents should be treated the same, not just the ones that draw enough attention.
They can start by eliminating (as I understand it) the use of patent fees to fund the USPTO. Those fees should go into the general fund and the USPTO should have a budget like everyone else. That way the USPTO isn't encouraged to allow every patent that crosses their path to be accepted just to collect the fees.
The definition of "significantly new" needs to be tightened up also. Some forms of patents should also be eliminated, such as business methods (a BS invention if you ask me).
Someday we might see copywrite reform also but I'm afraid I won't live that long.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
It means the system works. It does not work the way lots of people would like, but then, those people aren't in charge, aren't looking to be in charge, and wouldn't make it if they tried to take charge. It may be inconvenient, but governments will apply their authority until it is taken from them by force. Nobody seems to be upset enough about this issue to stage a coup, so the status quo prevails.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
You forgot to mention that the "little guy" is already dead.
Besides, he didn't invent anything--he *patented* an obvious concept and waited for someone ELSE to invent something that used the concept, so he could sue them.
I agree... partially.
I think the patent system should not be granted by a centralised and under-staffed authority like the patent office. Rather, patents should be peer reviewed. After all, granted patents become publicly disclosed anyways. The patent office simply acts like a program committee. The patent office receives patent applications and, depending on the domain of the patent, picks random reviewers from a pool. The reviews are returned and weighted differently depending on reviewer's association with the applying party. The patent office then chooses whether or not to grant a patent. All patent applications and their reviews are made public. Not perfect, but I think it's a good compromise.
First, companies or individuals can register as reviewers for specific categories of patents. They are then added to the pool of reviewers for said category. If patent applications are given to a pool of a dozen or so random reviewers, the odds are small that a small group of companies can collude to push their own stuff through.
Right now there's no penalty for companies to file a ton of patents. But a peer-review system ensures that anything they wish to patent will be pre-examined by their competitors. I think this will automatically push most things off the patent treadmill and into trade-secret territory.
Second, instead of patent clerks trying to digest the mangled legalese that most companies file, their competitors have a vested intrest in using their own lawyers to demangle and pick apart any application. The clerks then have access to a relatively clarified view of whether or not an application is valid.
(\(\
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*beware the cute-bunny virus
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?
This is ridiculous question. What do you think it says? The timing arises from a corrupt decision led by pure politics, driven by the U.S. Senate, caused the PTO to take up a Commissioner's reexamination, to protect a non-US company from an injunction.
Does it mean that the initial examination by the PTO was substandard? Of course not -- in fact, that very question was the point of the trial and two appeals. RIM, spending kazillions to search the world for prior art and multi-kazillions on lawyers to tear the patent and PTO to shreds, couldn't convince either a jury or the Federal Circuit that the patents were less than airtight. It was simply the economic and political fallout of a possible injunction that led to this "hail mary" pass.
Does this mean that the present rejections raise new doubt about the patents? Not necessarily, and probably not. It is ROUTINE for the PTO to initially reject all claims of a patent on an initial office action, and this may be nothing more than a perfunctory "through the paces" rejection. I don't really know how much trouble the patents are in (and not all claims were rejected by the way), because I have not studied the documents, but I find it astonishing that there would be any better prior art than was considered by the courts before. So much money was spent to defend RIM in this all-or-nothing case, it is hard to believe that any substantial new question of patentability could now arise. In any case, only time will tell. And even if there is a final rejection of each adjudicated infringed claim in each patent, there will be an administrative appeal, and then an appeal to the Federal Courts, which have so far been unimpressed by the claims of invaliidty.
Do not be surprised, however, if the patents reissue with the original claims (only one claim of many asserted is needed!), or claims not materially weaker than they began.
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.
Call your senators and ask them to please gut the patent system.
But more directly, you can contact NTP. NTP is a legal fiction of a business invented by an author of legal fiction by the name of Donald Stout. He is a partner at Antonelli Terry Stout & Kraus, LLP. Their phone number is 703-312-6600.
A thousand polite calls will be more effective than a thousand rude ones. Though honestly a few dozen rude ones wouldn't start WWIII.
Once you call, ask for Don Stout and then say "Please stop abusing the patent system."
Keep in mind that it is illegal to use an interstate communications device to harrass someone anonymously. So give your name on request! Then it's legal!
In this case I don't think you need to worry about that.
NTP is the one gaming the system here -- the NY Times called them a "virtual corporation" (according to Engadget), and they're nothing but a holding company with a fat war chest set up to create landmine lawsuits over the patents that they hold.
In terms of patent abuse, these guys make Microsoft look like Mother Teresa. They don't make anything (except lawsuits), they don't do anything, and the only way they have of making money is by going after the 'deep pockets' of established, successful companies. In short, they're an inherently parasitic business.
Is what they're doing legal? Yes. Should it be? Clearly not.
It would be different if they actually had a wireless-email product which was being infringed on by the Blackberry, but they don't and never did. All they ever wanted to do was bleed RIM for about a half billion dollars, and the hell with anyone who uses the service.
I think RIM is going to come out of this okay, and kudos to them for standing up to NTP. Regardless of what I'm sure were self-interested reasons for doing so, it was the right thing to do.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Courts certainly (district, appeals) can and do rule that some patents are invalid. It may be that they can only make this ruling on narrower grounds (fraud by patent applicant, failure to disclose prior art, etc) than the USPTO, but I'm not a lawyer so I don't know.
The grandparent poster's question is valid. Perhaps an IP attorney can enlighten us?
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
We have 2 sides that aren't going to back down, one because they don't have anything to lose and the other because they feel they are on the moral high ground and should not lose. No one is going to quit the battlefield and run off with a settlement. Instead, some fundamental absurdities of the patent system are being exposed. An earlier article expressed incredulity over the fact that RIM could have settled for a few million, but now the issue could cost them billions. Yes, and the Union could have bought out all the slave owners and avoided the Civil War. Not that simple. Who's to say a hundred other patent holders wouldn't come after RIM if RIM caved to NTP?
It looks to me like NTP did make working prototypes, and tried to market their product. That 2nd step did not succeed, and we really can't say why. Was their design in some way impractical? Too expensive? Too bulky? Was there a technical reason why their product did not go further? Or are there other reasons, such as the partner never intended to play fair and was only stringing NTP along until they'd learned enough to make their own version? Questions like those are hard to answer, but for the patent system to work, we need answers to those sorts of questions.
Enter RIM. They apparently independently design a product that does the same thing NTP tried to do. Did RIM really independently do the work, or did they copy from NTP? In this case, it seems clear that RIM did not borrow from NTP. Didn't even know NTP existed. This puts up more questions: How can we know whether some idea was independently conceived more than once or whether it was copied? Maybe we can tell after a great deal of close examination of both sides, but such an effort may not be worth the time and cost. However, if the effort is made and the answer is they are independent efforts, then the next question is if it's "non-obvious" how come others also came up with the same ideas? And we need the answer to the obviousness question beforehand, so we know whether to grant a patent. What about the many fine shades of independent thinking? Many, many variations of many different ideas are needed. A great idea is a synthesis of many puzzle pieces, and each piece may be a synthesis of yet more puzzle pieces, with the pieces changeable and applicable to many puzzles. The law treats an idea or piece of an idea as if it has clearly defined boundaries, like a piece of land. In reality, ideas overlap considerably. There's more than one way to solve most puzzles. Where should the boundaries be drawn? Can boundaries be drawn? Why should any one idea be enshrined as the one and only solution to some problem, and all other solutions to the same or related problems be suspected as mere copies of the original solution? Since no one can tell about the obviousness let alone the other points, the patent office has taken the patentable-until-proven-otherwise route, granted a great number of dubious patents, then let the justice system decide boundaries (which may be undecidable) on a case-by-case basis, as disputes arise. Maybe it's just coincidence that that slant brings in more revenue.
In the court case, RIM's legal defense really blew it. Lied about prior art.
RIM has other blemishes. They have not hesitated to do unto others as NTP is doing unto them.
And now RIM is trying a wonderful new line. They've placed their head on the chopping block and showed their users, some of whom are lawmakers, that danger to RIM is danger to us all. They've really put the issue in the limelight. For the sake of justice for one "little guy", will the lawmakers do nothing and let the system hose everyone else, including themselves? So now the patent office has "tentatively" invalidated NTP's patents! They still don't know whether those patents should have been granted.
If NTP's case has merit under the current patent system, how should NTP be com
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I went through this with a patent on game physics engines. The USPTO rejected some claims as an insufficent advance over prior art. So I sent in published reviews of games that didn't use my technology. "This game really sucked". "Worst game I ever played". "Game physics terrible". "Objects randomly flying off into space after a collision".
The USPTO then accepted the claims without any further argument. That's how you prove non-obviousness - show previous failure. If others tried and failed, but yours works, then you must have invented something.