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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."
Interesting system in het States: no valid patents, but stil possible infringement... But then, hey, I'm a stupid European ;-0
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.
I don't have a blackberry, but I've been waiting all morning for this news. I was wondering if the judge was going to shut down Blackberry service. I was thinking about how the government (or legislature) would respond if RIM was given 30 days to shut down their service. And hopefully it woulda been, a first step to the patent system being overhauled.
Oh well. This is probably the better outcome.
I could have gotten out of pager support this weekend.
The famous U.S. v. United Shoe Machinery Company case of 1941.
United Shoe was caught abusing its patent portfolio to keep competitors at bay; this was the same rationale that got Rambus into a lot of trouble a few years back when courts said Rambus' patents on certain computer memory designs was used to keep DDR-SDRAM technology at bay in favor of Rambus' own RDRAM technology.
In short, NTP was abusing US patent laws to keep a competitor at bay.
SCREW NTP!! Rat bastards!
Yay.. I mean what the hell.. I can't understand how you can patent an idea like e-mail / txt through a wireless device..
Why what a great leap of logic for me to want to get my e-mail or stay in touch remotely.. however did the great minds at NTP think that up. Oh how did they ever come up with the idea.. Patent a very specific way to do something.. don't hand out patents for vauge ideas.
I wonder if can patent and new way of doing business in which people give me money for services and or goods and I refuse to give them exact change. Then anyone who rounds up a coffee or newspaper will owe me a crap load of money!! Whoot.. where's the nearest Mercedes dealership!
Stupid people.. I tell you.. back in my day AirWolf wouldn't have sorted this out in no time.
Nothin is more AirWolf than AirWolf!
you have no understanding of the case, but want to give your useless opinion
You must be new here. Welcome aboard!
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.
Really, how greedy do you have to be? NTP pretty much had a deal with RIM for $450M one year ago. Sheesh, for a "company" with no staff or product or facilities? Forget haggling over the details about future revenue streams or whatever happened to break down the previous deal. I would have been happy to sell the whole "company" for that much money. Be rich, buy an island, and sit around on a beach trying to think about what other patents I should get or buy to screw over the next industry.
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.
Yeah, but in this case that doesn't matter. Today was the day, and all we needed to know was Blackberry staying or going.
Thats big news a little before quitting time on a friday. Especially since its a long holiday weekend here (mardi gras). Getting the news that blackberries would be shut down or not just before a 4-day weekend was big deal to us.
Han shot first.
Not sure if folks realize it but most of the government relies on Blackberries, including many mission critical areas... I'm not seeing any judge ruling them out anytime soon. A number of these agencies have been working (unsuccessfuly) on trying to port their info over to another form from the Blackberry and it ain't happening.
That is one company I see coming through all this with flying colors, or else they could make shit real bad for a lot of people.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
does anyone see a parallel?
Why not start with the colorful "Related Stories" box at the top of this very page?
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
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$$.
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!
Lie by the sword, die by the sword.
NTP should have acccepted RIM's first offer instead of being greedy.
Nuff said.
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."
What the predecessor to NTP did was demonstrate a workable system in the late 80s/early 90s, before all that infrastructure was in place.
Let's take a look at this, because I think that I have a very different take on software patents than you do.
The earliest patent number I see here is 5,438,611.
That patent was granted August 1, 1995, and the application filed May 23, 1994.
Ricochet was already a commercial product in 1994. So, even ignoring the fact that I don't think that there's any benefit in granting patents on this stuff, the "infrastructure" certainly *was* in place. This was not an idea that nobody could or was coming up with.
He tried to bring it to market. He had a deal almost done with IBM, even demonstrated it at trade shows. His company was liquidated after the IBM deal fell threw, but was left with the patent portfolio.
"Almost done", huh?
He didn't sell it to them. IBM decided that they didn't want it. Unless you were involved in the negotiations *on IBM's side*, I don't see how you can have any idea how close they were. As it turns out, given how well Ricochet did, IBM probably was making a reasonable choice.
Several years later, RIM came on the scene and developed a workable system based on his technology.
And this is relevant to IBM how? How do you claim it is "based on his technology"? Are you claiming that RIM would not have had the 'revolutionary' idea of a wireless email device sans this guy, and that they proceeded to steal his idea?
What this guy did, if it had value (since I sure didn't see it) would have been in the device's design itself. The idea was neither groundbreaking nor unexpected.
He offered a license for $4 million.
Suppose you design, build, market, and make successful a cool gadget. Why should you hand $4M to every guy that walks up and demands money? Maybe he wanted to make a similar product in the same timeframe, okay, but he didn't.
Furthermore, at $100K a year (which, I think, is a darn good salary), and even ignoring inflation, what is being demanded is 40 years -- an entire working lifetime -- of salary. Even had RIM directly run out of one of his demos, said "Let's steal this idea" (and I don't have evidence that they didn't, but I doubt that you have evidence that they did), you're talking about nothing other than making a wireless computer access email. Does that take *forty years* of work to come up with this design?
RIM didn't even bother to respond, because they were too busy driving competitors out of the market using their own patents.
That may be true. I'm not familiar with RIM's IP background, and I'd be more than happy to see RIM not able to go after people with their patents either.
After RIM repeatedly blew him off, he got pissed and sued.
He demanded $4M, and RIM didn't bite. Okay.
RIM's lawyers were caught falsifying evidence. They still wouldn't pay the licensing. He started raising his price.
RIM's lawyers apparently put some sort of newer software on an '87 device. I have no further information on it. It may be that the outdated software was no longer available, and they just used the current version -- even though the original client could have performed the same tasks. It may have been that email couldn't be sent at *all* with that version. I don't have any knowledge about the specifics, and I doubt that you do either.
However, this is still breaking away from my point, which is that I don't think that there should be patents on this kind of thing at all. It is quite possible that RIM's lawyers conduct
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.