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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."
"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.
Looks like a court will be considering an injunction tomorrow!
s p
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1930775,00.a
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.
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
I'm getting a little tired of this one: RIM sued Palm because they started using a keypad RIM had developed.
It drives me crazy when someone looks at the thumbpad on a BlackBerry and proclaims that the idea is "obvious". Remember that before RIM invented that thumbpad people were sending SMS messages with a nine button numeric keypad.
Everything is "obvious" to people who look at something after the fact. What they don't understand is that a hardware revision costs many hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not chump change, not a drawing on a napkin... actually making something. It takes real money to hire mechanical engineers, draft it out, cost it out, and try to market a new way of doing something. In the end, a gamble like that provides an advantage worth having in the marketplace.
Furthermore, think of the context. At the time Palm had about 80% of the PDA market. RIM was a new entrant into the market. Up until that point they had just made pagers that received email with PDA functionality as an afterthought. What happens? After a couple of years, RIM has eaten into their market because of the wireless email capability. Palm tries to counter with various attempts at wireless connectivity, and then tries to add the keypad.
I'm not in favour of lawsuits without reason, but I have sympathy for organizations that actually *build things* trying to protect their investments.
Look at the actual patent before spewing out gibberish and put calculator keypads and Blackberry keypads in the same sentence.
It dictates the keys in very specific shapes, sizes, and relative arrangements - which I suspect is the result of some serious UI research.
It's not "just a miniature keyboard".
BS. The blackberry packet radio sends positive connectivity messages off to the towers. This is how the protocol ensures delivery of the data.
Why do you think, the tower just beams out the email and hopes the device is connected?
Curious that inaccurate remarks are getting modded up as "Insightful" thesedays.
...) without the handicap of obscene royalties for baseless patents.
NTP has "WON" the suit, in that the court has ruled that RIM did in fact infringe on the patents. Now the court needs to decide what NTP gets for it. So far, the court has awarded (as a preliminary step while ligitation continues) NTP over 8% of RIM's sales, but NTP is not happy enough with that. RIM and NTP have not been able to come to an agreement on licensing, royalties, whatever, so the court now has to decide whether or not to enforce NTP's request for an injunction which will stop sales and service of the infringing devices. Both sides are calling the other's bluff. NTP hopes that if the injunction goes through, RIM will buckle and pay up hefty royalties rather than fizzle and die. RIM says it has a non-infringing software update ready to deploy if an injunction happens. RIM (and the world) also knows it will eventually win, because the USPTO has already issued preliminary rejection of ALL patents claims concerning the case, and now, a final rejection of some (2 of 9 claims IIRC). But until they are all final rejections, RIM is still infringing and therefore in a precarious legal position (subject to injunctions, for instance). NTP wants to cash in; RIM just wants to continue conducting business (i.e. earning money rather than litigating as a source of income, ala NTP, RAMBUS, SCO,