RIM Wins BlackBerry Patent Dispute in UK

Guinnessy writes "Research In Motion has won its first patent case against Inpro Licensing. Justice Nicholas Pumfrey rejected a claim by Luxembourg-based Inpro Licensing SARL that it holds a UK patent on the technology used by RIM to transpose images and Internet files onto BlackBerry screens ruling that all the claims at issue were either obvious or lacking in novelty. It is the second European legal victory this year for RIM, following a Munich court's invalidation of a German version of the same patent. The big court case of course is on Feb 24 when a U.S. court will consider whether the BlackBerry service should be halted for infringing patents held by licensing firm NTP."

Comments

Prior Art

[Fzz]

I was the expert witness for RIM in this case.

The problem with finding prior art is that you need to find one piece of prior art that covers all the aspects of a claim. You can't mosaic them. The prior art we used in trial was the following:

• A. Fox, E. Brewer, "GloMop: Global Mobile Computing By Proxy", Position paper, (Sep 1995), Used to be available from: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fox/glomop.

• Joel Bartlett, Experience with a Wireless World Wide Web client, Digital WRL lab Technical Note TN46

• Stefan Gessler and Andreas Kotulla. PDAs as mobile WWW browsers. Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, Vol. 28, No. 1-2, 1995, pp. 53-59.

• Joshi, Anupam, Weerasinghe, R., Mcdemott, S., Tan, B., Bernhardt, G. and Weerawarana, S., "Mowser: Mobile Platforms and Web Browsers'', Bulletin of the TCOS, IEEE Computer Society.

The general concept was clearly obvious back then. But the patent had some specific details that Inpro claimed were not obvious. I believe they were obvious to someone in the field in 1996. Clearly the judge agreed.