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Blackberry Injunction Postponed
Astin writes "The PTO has rejected the last of the NTP patents against Research in Motion. On top of this, Judge Spencer has decided that Blackberry service won't be shut down today, but he will issue a decision on the injunction 'as soon as reasonably possible.' RIM CEO Jim Balsillie just said on CNBC that it's 'quite possible' that NTP won't see any settlement from RIM at all now."
Patent squatting should forfeit the rights to a patent after, say, 3 years if no progress has been made. For example, if Company A patents something, then sits on it for years. Company B makes a device that uses A's patent, but A has done nothing with it said patent. If A can't prove that they are working on developing the invention in the patent, then the patent is voided. That includes you, hoverboard patent!
:-D
Vote for me in 2008 and I will see this passed into law
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
What annoys me is that I read an article where the judge stated that he'd make sure there were provisions for the governemnt so RIM could continue service for them. I'd like to know what incredibly vital governemnt service is being supplied by BlackBerry email?
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that the government is subject to Law.
http://www.computerworld.com/mobiletopics/mobile/s tory/0,10801,108094,00.html
If you're going to enforce the law, ENFORCE THE FUCKING LAW!! Don't make exceptions for government panseys who feel their operations will be hurt (oh, like other people aren't hurt? or are you special?) if Blackberry does get shut down.
Does "a government for the people, by the people" ring any LIBERTY BELLS?
I'm generally against patents in software and in IT in general. But it would have pleased me so much to see Crackberry addicts suffering from withdrawal.
There is no more annoying thing than sitting down in a roomful of people trying to make an argument about something important just to find all eyes downward towards those vile and evil devices. The meeting ends and you have to resend the information via email, wasting two good hours that could've been dedicated to other more worthy pursuits such as drinking.
I actually refused having a Crackberry. Everybody here thought I was from another planet, but once I'm out the door at 5:30PM I'm free. I don't want to be answering emails at 9:00 PM.
the future is but past forgotten
Possibly the settlement could involve transfer of the system to NTP's control?
Good Lord! The last thing in the world NTP wants is control of the system. They're just in it for the money.
If they had control of the system they might actually have to do something like work to earn their living, instead of just buying, selling and litigating bits of paper. They much prefer being part of the something for nothing economy.
KFG
I personally would love to see the blackberries shut down. I work in a real estate agency and all the brokers use them. I would LOVE to see the havoc caused if these self-proclaimed "important people" cant get their messages on the spot. They really need to learn that not everything needs to be done 5 minutes ago.
1. The government won't react till the day the service is turned off.
2. Then they'll look surprised
3. Then they'll have a committee set up to investigate the issue
4. On being blamed for lack of action, they'll feign ignorance and say they were not aware of the seriousness of the situation because it's not every day that RIM shuts its services off
5. They'll say they'll treat this as learning experience
6. They'll look into separating RIM from the DHS
7. They'll find a scapegoat
8. And then they'll wait for Mardi Gras!
But this seems unlikely. The government would never do that.
does anyone see a parallel?
1. E-mail protocols: widely available, run on top of general switched-packet networks
2. Switched-packet transport protocols: widely available
3. Wireless switched-packet protocols: available
What RIM did was:
1. Design a usable device
2. Create the infrastructure so that the devices can send and receive e-mail almost everywhere.
3. Profit
What NTP wants is to jump directly to 3. Innovation, my a$$.
Sorry, that's crap.
RIM ignored it because the patents were obviously ridiculous, and they knew they wouldn't stand up. Which, of course, they haven't. There are a few more possible steps in the process, but if things have gotten this far, the outcome is pretty certain: NTP's patents are not valid under US law.
Big company, small company, money, lawyers, whatever. Not relevant to the issues, only to the process. Bad patents getting tossed, that's the news here.
Working around a patent infringement by changing what you're doing so that you're not infringing any more is not underhanded; it's explicitly allowed, and even encouraged - because doing that is creating another invention. Just ask a patent attorney.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
The mainstream press hasn't picked up the truth of this matter. It seems crystal clear at this point that the judge will rule against RIM in the coming week or two.
Also, bear thee in mind that rejections by the patent office mean next to nothing, both in the trial and for the validity of the patents. Rejection just means that the patent office is challening the applicant to prove the merit of their patents, and 90% of the time they are subsequently reapproved. NTP only needs one valid patent for them to win, and they have around seven that are applicable, so the odds are monumentally in their favor. The patent rejection process and the trial process are entirely separate, too, so while RIM may try to point at the rejection and say they should be handed the case, the judge is going to tell them that it doesn't matter in the least.
Moreover, the judge seems to be pretty irritated with RIM all around. I'm told that the only time he was taking extensive notes was when the paperwork needed to obtain an injunction was being discussed, and the rest of the time he spent looking annoyed. This isn't solid evidence, of course, but it all points to RIM getting smacked, with victory extremely unlikely. For whatever reason, the non-financial press hasn't picked up on this, and RIM's stock is up today in spite of the pending bad news.
The judge could also set aside the jury verdict, since the patents are invalid, but still award huge sums of money to NTP just to punish RIM for lying in court.
It looks to me like the judge is the main fraudster in all of this. Apparently, the judge threw a fit because somebody noticed a 1990's file date in directory where supposedly 1980 software was being run for a prior art demonstration. Wellll, this sort of thing makes great theater, but it does not make sound law when you consider that the 1980's software was in fact able to do exactly what RIM said it would, and as proof of that, the patents have in fact been invalidated via that prior art. Somehow the judge twisted that all into a travesty of due process.
RIM's appeal of the initial case argued that the judge's decision to throw out the demonstration was "an abuse of discretion" since TekNow clearly had software for SAM from the 1980s and that the post-1991 directory dates of the demonstration software "occurred merely because TekNow's license-protection software automatically updates the directory dates with each new installation of the SAM software... RIM was able to successfully run the demonstration after the trial with 1980s software and provide evidence of prior art.
Throw the idiot judge in jail and throw away the key, I say. This judge is a menace to the rule of law.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
It's entertaining that that this kind of nonsense could be promoted on a site so dedicated to dicussion and understnding of technology. The notion that anyone had anything to invent in the alleged firld of "wireless e-mail" is preposterous, and a distortion of anything resembling reality. The beginnings of the ARPA internet are to be found in the ALOHA net work of the University of Hawaii, which networked Universities in the Hawaiian islands wirelessly and developed the basic shared-channel packet based communication system that was continued in development by literally thousands of honest, hardworking, patriotic citizens to the benefit of our nation and to provide for the national defense.
a npsc2.pdf
By the late seventies, globe spanning networks comunicating both wired and wirelessly had benefited freely from these technologies for scientific, edcutational and defense purposes and our armed forces were developing field systems for command, control and communication that provided for vastly greater capability than these alleged "inventors" are capable of describing to this day. The "inventors could have become aware of these facts simply by having any interest whatsoever in computer data networking, since these developments were widely and notoriously published. See for instance this publication from 1987:
http://www.gordon.army.mil/AC/articles/fiedler/df
If these alleged "inventors" had gone to their public library, they would have had access to all of the information that they purport to "teach" in their patents. The fact that the judge in this case ignored and suppressed the testimony and evidence presented by the actual inventors of wireless data internetworking (including Dr. Norm Abramson the primary investigator in the development of ALOHAnet) and the actual ownership of the technologies enabling "wireless e-mail" by the People of the United States makes this case a travesty of the highest order and an insult to the judicial system.
... and in a symbolic jesture, tens of thousands of system administrators threw their blackberry devices into the toilets of the world in disgust that bosses will continue to harass them at all hours of the day, night, weekend, or vacation day to perform even the most remedial of tasks. If you're not happy with the status quo, just go find yourself another job. What? The other job also expects you to instantly respond to every email without excuse as well?
Not that there aren't a dozen other companies waiting to jump in and fill the void at a moments notice with other technology solutions, but sometimes this blackberry craze strikes me as ridiculous in terms of what the expectations are when your employer gives you one. After seeing what this device did to many of my co-workers, I deliberately told my employer for several years that I did not want this device, as it would be a waste of money. I did not work like this on _MY_ time. I still maintained an old cell phone from them for reasonable true emergency purposes, as this requires some extra effort on their part to get ahold of me if a system crash, etc. The cell phone has basic email receipt functionality, so serious system alerts still were sent to me. This seemed like a reasonable medium. Enter a few months ago, and I finally had my job threatened if I did not take a Blackberry to demonstrate a committment to my job equal to my peers (I guess the 50+ hours a week I put in isn't enough anymore). As I suspected all along, the line is slowly being pushed. If an end user sends an email about their crashing of an old, little used dev box on the weekend, my boss expects me to respond right away from the "convenience" of my blackberry while out with the family or at a movie. By respond, this means telling the guy that I will rush home to remote access in and try and reset the dev box so he can keep playing, or drive into the office to physically resolve the issue. Had it just been a cell phone, I know for a fact the guy would have just waited until Monday morning when I was back on company time. If my boss emails me with a question on Saturday afternoon where he is sharing his thoughts about Microsoft's latest strategy, I am expected to respond from the Blackberry within whatever his daily definition of a "reasonable" timeframe to agree with him or give an immediate plan of when this is going to be implemented in our company.
So I know the typical response is if you don't like it, go find another job, which I am actually currently doing (for other reasons). What scares me about this though is that a good portion of my peers don't mind working under these conditions. I've been doing this job for many years, so I certainly understand the expectations of coming in on a weekend or late at night to resolve a crashed router or server issue. But I just see this type of technology blurring the line between when you walk out the door at 5pm/6pm/7pm, and them keeping in constant contact with you. Sure it's good... but for who?
Next up - map tracking software and GPS due to be the next big thing on these types of devices, I seriously start to wonder if my employer is going to see "Hey, he is only 9 miles from the office, so he has no excuse not to come in on Sunday to help put in a few hours."