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RIM Wins Ground in Patent War
ttyp0 writes "The maker of the BlackBerry on Wednesday gained some ground as it fights a battle over patents with NTP, which is trying to shut down most sales and service of the portable e-mail device in the United States. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued a final rejection of one of five disputed patents owned by NTP, another step in a long process that Research In Motion Ltd. hopes will allow it to keep operating its U.S. BlackBerry service. NTP, a closely held patent holding company, has successfully sued RIM for infringement of its patents. I've been following the case closely as our company is about to invest in BES, a costly venture indeed."
Didn't Bill Clinton have a job there?
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
...it's a shame that the lawyers win no matter what.
"I've been following the case closely as our company is about to invest in BES, a costly venture indeed."
Yes, purchasing BES is expensive. But you can get some good deals, like my company did, where you buy 10 Blackberries and get a copy of BES for free.
There isn't much news to this story -- and the submitter quoted close to half of the article in their summary...
This really isn't great news for the Blackberry, because RIM has already lost the original suit from NTP -- and as the article states, it could take *years* for the validity of the remaining 4 patents to be finalized... NTP could drag this process out in court for quite some time, all the while putting pressure on RIM or possibly finding a judge that will grant some type of injunction.
Sometimes it doesn't matter if you're right; it matters more if you're around for the long haul. After all, what's the use of being an excellent boxer if you can't last past 3 rounds?
NTP has the edge here...
albeit in a Slashback. :) Anyways, good news I suppose.
FanFictionRecs.net
A more apt classification would have been:
a ckberries dept.
From the the-department-of-justice-shant-be-deprived-of-bl
I wish for RIM and all associated workarounds to cease to exist. Honestly, how many of you have Blackberries for anything other than work? I, for one, would welcome our new blood pressure lowering Blackberry-less overlords.
RIM started this whole intellectual property mess. Some of you remember them making lots of noise about protecting their IP against all the scummy folks who were using it.
Of course, as with all things software patent related, it turns out that others had also patented similar things. And whamo, their story changes.
Anyone have the details of this history? It's something that seems to have been forgotten in this story. I know RIM sued at least Handspring and Good, but I'm really curious about the threats of litigation that got NTP to go after them.
Instead of RIM threatened by bogus patents, this story could very well be company that litigated others out of the market faces own medicine.
I don't remember this well enough though, someone has got to have the history in a better format. All I remember is that RIM was running around talking about patents from way way back.
The best solution is something like RoadSync (http://roadsync.com/ where it does everything RIM does but on any device you want. You also don't have to pay monthly/yearly fees with a product with this.
Hasn't this dispute been going on forever? The sad irony is that if you add up all the legal resources consumed by this case and divert them to pure technology you could completely reinvent and develop the entire system.
How does all this help to promote the progress of science and useful arts as set forth in Article I, secition 8 of the US Constitution and for which patents are supposed to have their purpose?
In some perverse way Blackberry's troubles may be a deserved lesson in not adopting an open standard.
Even if Blackberry wins this, they'll eventually be hit with a "hot coffee" musculoskeletal disorder lawsuit.
So what's the answer? More lawyers, less engineers and invertors?
And you're running MS Exchange -- Don't. Get Goodlink. It is 100 times better, works smoothly, and has a TRUE sync. And it's pretty worry-free. I have used them side by side for about 2 years now, and Goodlink just works better in spades. Administration, upgrades, deployment, etc... it's all better and simpler.
However if you are not on MS Exchange, then of course that would necessitate the RIM solution.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
I'll admit to a notion unpopular in these realms - I do think patents are good. If someone invests time, money, and ingenuity to create a new commercial product, then they should reap the benefits of that in exchange for making the invention public. Sadly, the current system does not live up to this ideal.
The rise of lawyer-dominated patent holding companies, such as NTP, suggests that the current patent system doesn't do enough to drive mass production of new inventions. These lawsuit-happy companies thrive on the 1% inspiration and attack those that invest the 99% perspiration required to commercialize new ideas.
To discourage "thought-sweatshops" that just invent without investing, I'd bring back the working model requirement for granting a patent. Forcing the inventor to spend real money to create that which was thought up would both encourage commercialization -- pushing the invention to the prototype stage -- and discourage indiscriminate legal land-grabs with blankets of frivolous patents.
If NTP had actually created a competing product to the Blackberry then I would support their challenge of RIM. If one bona fide maker of telecom devices creates something new and innovative, they should be able to patent it and protect it from imitators. That NTP only generated paper, not products, makes me less supportive of their claim.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
> The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued a final rejection of one of five disputed patents owned by NTP
Does this make Feb 24 2006 legal gatherings moot regarding RIM network shutdown?
I mean, think about it: All those high and mighty people suddenly without their devices.
Who knows, maybe this will mean the patent system gets (at least partially) fixed.
Write your congressmen and ask them to drag these patent examiners in for questioning:
William G. Trost:
6,317,592 and 6,067,451 Electronic mail system with RF communications to mobile processors
Stephen Chin
6,272,190 System for wireless transmission and receiving of information and method of operation thereof
6,198,783 System for wireless serial transmission of encoded information
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
And I thought my thumbs were going to get better (Sore Thumbs and Texting - http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/23/193521 5)...
I guess I better opt for thumb replacement surgery.
There are so many flaws in the system... and allowing software patents is the root of half of them. The other half comes from not giving the patent offices enough resources or incentives to properly screen patents for prior art, obviosity etc. All of which is much harder for software patents, so the 2 problems compound.
I wish but, there are still four more patents involved in the suit. That suit cannot be dismissed unless all five were to be invalidated. Though this is a likely outcome, it could take a couple more years before the patent office gets off its arse and completes the dispute process.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
Patents are only part of the problem. With or without a patent fiasco, RIM is still trying tie your hands with proprietary protocols. What makes this even dumber is that push email is a stupid idea to begin with. A convenient form factor, ease of use, great. But push email and proprietary protocols? People who buy that crap deserve what they get.
To Quote: http://www.rim.com/news/press/2006/pr-22_02_2006-
It only took a month to go from the second to final re examination on the most recient invalidated patent. Yea right the process is going to take years ignoreing everything thats taken place already... This guy needs to be banned from journalism.
They may have won the ground but what about the sky?!
> NTP, a closely held patent holding company, has successfully sued
> RIM for infringement of its patents.
"successfully sued" inplies that they have won something. They have not. All that they have succeeded in doing so far is filing, which anyone with the cash for the filing fees can do. Tomorrow is the hearing on their motion for a preliminary injunction. There is an excellent chance that it will be denied.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Yes, yes he did. It was right next to FuckAmericaInTheAss Inc., where Mr. George W. Bush worked.
There are still 4 patents that are under review. So, tomorrow is still the big day. Even if NTP is granted an injunction, don't expect to see Blackberries go dark. There will have to be some sort of transition period, say 30 days. It'll be interesting to watch RIM race to migrate all of their US customers to the patent-safe workaround (assuming that the workaround does in fact exist).
This long, uncertain, high-stakes patent war shows how the patent system, even when applied by giants, makes for an unstable, unpredictable business climate. Rather than protect property rights so inventors have a stable environment into which people can invest to fund inventions, patents threaten property, reducing rights to privileges bought at a law firm, but retractable by a bigger law firm later on.
Beyond all the other arguments - constitutional, pragmatic, new-economic, philosophical - there really isn't a legitimate simple business argument in favor of the patent system any more. Let's get rid of it, and treat it patents like any monopoly: temporary, and allowed as long as they're not anticompetitive.
--
make install -not war
When people come in and start flaming people while saying things along the lines of "software patents are awesome, and you all suck" or "Microsoft kicks Linux butt", you just mark them Foe on Slashdot or killfile them on Usenet. Life is too short to get in flamewars when there are other people out there that post reasoned responses.
Generally, anyone calling you a "fucktard" in their posts is a pretty good candidate for ignoring.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Care to back that up with a link?
If you have a Blackberry, your phone's radio is constantly on and connected to the server. Otherwise the push functionality would not work.
With a polling phone, the radio only has to power up every poll interval to make a connection.
Since the radio is the main battery draw of any phone, not the CPU, I would hardly think a blackberry would be easier on batteries than a polling phone.
Didn't this already appear in a slashback the night before last?
Not like I submitted it then, or anything.
Is it just me, or has there been a lot more blatant offtopic flaming/hooker ads/porn ads on slashdot lately?
Hey, can I bum a sig?
Y'know, part of me almost wishes that NTP managed to cause a shutdown of US BB service, because it would wake the US up about this software patent stupidity. Shutting down a service so broadly used in the business and political sector would have CEOs and senators literally climbing over each other to find a solution to prevent such a problem from happening again.
Meanwhile Canadia would continue to have BB service, causing a potentially embarrassing technological service imbalance on North America. While there are already one or two or so of these (digital radio much?), such a high-profile one would be a thorn in software patentry's side.
Oh, and maybe Canada would see the havoc in US over it and prevent the same thing from happening on its shores, likely before the US could fix it, spearheading patent sensibility in North America.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.