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RIM Settles Long-Standing Blackberry Claim
David Jao writes "Research in Motion has agreed to pay 612.5 million dollars for a 'full and final settlement of all claims' resulting from the NTP patent lawsuit against the makers of BlackBerry. According to the article, the settlement is 'on the low end of expectations', perhaps because the patents in question had earlier been preliminarily ruled invalid by the US Patents & Trademarks Office." Many article submitters characterize this move as 'giving in' to NTP's tactics. What do you think?
...if the patents that based NTP's lawsuit were going to be ruled invalid, what was the basis for the settlement? Why didn't RIM just tell NTP to go fuck themselves and wait for the patent office to finish. No patent == no patent infringement == no lawsuit.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
This is ridiculous. Why should a company with only an idea and no product have any claim to over half a billion dollars? It's not like Blackberry stole their idea, right?
Low end of expectations? Wow. This justifies patent squatting to the unscrupulous looking for the cash-out.
un burrito me trampeó.
I'm pretty disappointed with this move by RIM. I was hoping that by going all the way through the courts we might get some serious patent reform out of the whole mess. While this brought a lot of attention to the issue, I fear that it will just go back to being business as usual at the patent office.
"To lead the people, you must walk behind them"
They had no other choice but to give in. There was an article in the WSJ today that talked about how many people were switching to competitor's products, just because of the uncertainty surrounding the Blackberry.
It will be interesting to see how easily they recover from this.
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N
ot only is it "giving into" NTP, but it is also giving NTP 612.5 million "bullets" to go after anybody who transmits a message using a computer. Which they will do, because it is their business model to do so.
So if someone tries to blackmail me for $100 and I talk them down to $50, I didn't give in either?
That's some faulty logic right there.
It's about money. RIM figured that it was going to cost them more than 612.5M for lawyers fees, lost revenue and the court decision. They did what was best for their company. We just have a crappy system for IP and judicial arbitration.
is a patent troll with $600M in the bank.
Do you have ESP?
I'm not in favor of NTP or anything, but the people who point out that NTP had no product are missing the point of patents.
Suppose you invented the Blackberry. You. Right now. You have the idea. Now what? Do you have the financial backing to manufacture a million Blackberrys? Do you have the industry connections to go around and make deals with all the mobile carriers to get your service into people's hands? No. But it's still a good idea, so you want to go forward with it. That means finding potential partners and investors. But just talking to those people about it is spreading the idea around. Suppose you go to the mobile company and say, "I have these plans for this service, I'm going to call it Blackberry." What's stopping them from just making the service themselves and cutting you out of the picture completely?
Your patent is.
In an ideal world, that's what patents are for: protecting the little guy inventor from big business.
Breakfast served all day!
This didn't solve anything. If anything it made things worse. I didn't see *ANY* reporting that the flawed patent system was at fault.
All I heard from the mainstream news media was the Blackberry was being sued, and now they settled for $600 Million, so, in my mind, they must have been at fault.
Furthermore, this payment will embolden other patent trolls who want to be fed to the tune of millions for doing nothing.
And the Patent System will go merrily on it way, because now that Senators can use their Blackberries again, do you think they are going to give a tinker's damn that the system is flawed?
If I'd been running Blackberry, I'd have shut down service for 24 hours, with the message "we can't provide service due to a flawed patent system.".
Does anybody here remember the day everyone made their webpages BLACK as a protest? Does anybody remember when it was OKAY to fight back against something that was wrong? Now it seems, the M.O. is to give up, pay the bastards and lick your wounds, regardless of who's right or wrong.
In fact, the more wrong you are, the harder you should fight, it seems, because these days, the good guy always loses. (RIAA anyone?)
What a wonderful lesson to teach our younger people.
George Lucas should make a movie on that subject.
So this is how freedom dies. With a $600 Million payout.
TTYL
A disgusted and concerned old-timer.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
This company deserves to go straight to hell. $612 million is a rap on the knuckles.
I was recently involved in a patent fight, where we had comprehensive prior art, and were really convinced that we were going to prevail eventually, but between getting to trial in the first place, and the resultant inevitable appeals, it was cheaper to settle. It made my skin crawl, but we did it anyway.
Also, remember that juries on cases like this are not technologists who will readily understand a complex technological argument, but "peers" who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty.
Actually, the "making a product" issue is only a relatively modern claim. It used to be that all patent submissions required a working model to be submitted at the same time. The PTO got tired of storing everything, so gave up on it.
What's stopping them from just making the service themselves and cutting you out of the picture completely?
I don't know. It's the Microsoft Model (just ask Citrix, Symantec, etc). If you have a shit-hot application idea, Microsoft *will* eventually start competing against you, whether you like it (i.e., they pay you some $$$ for it) or not.
In the other copyright-associated industries, it's simply claimed to be a copyright violation: "he stole my original idea for 'Big Momma'. I showed him my script 3 years ago called 'Big Fat Hoochie Mama', but he didn't want to produce it. Now I want my 10% of the gross box office take, or one million lira, which ever is greater!".
If the applications can be copyrighted, then that's how it should be resolved. Software (and software techniques, including business models) should simply *not* be patentable.1
If you're shopping an idea around for a software application or service to investors, you'd better have a pretty good NDA and agressive lawyer to back up that NDA...
The Software industry has been allowed to get away with choosing the best parts of different areas of IP to benefit themselves while using the best negative parts of IP law to keep out competition or screw customers out of $$$. But the toothpaste is out of the tube on that one.
Either software is copyrightable, patentable or simply trade secret. None of this license bullshit and double-speak in them, either. It's either a physical product (patentable) or an instance of a copyrightable publication.
" along with Diane Peters from OSDL, Bruce Perens, lawyers from IBM and others got together at the USPTO last month to talk about ways to improve patent quality. No solutions yet, but some good discussion."
Why don't you get together to discuss the fact that most of the significant discoveries in computers, information and software fields came about before software patents.
And if you want to quibble with me, fine, but answer this: If software patents were important to drive innovation in the high-tech industry, then how did some many great pieces of software get written in the days before software patents?
Let's not pretend that software patents are an old, time-tested way of protecting software. They're not, they're less than 10 years old. So rather than accept a relatively recent ruling by a court (Not even a law from congress), why don't we do the right thing and stop software patents. The fact that the courts lowered the bar so that nonobviousness was no longer the primary determinant of whether a patent should be granted should be reason enough to get rid of them.
Name something... anything out there in the market that was only possible because of software patents. The idea of these patents isn't to make NTP rich simply because of knowing how to game the system, but to advance the state of the art. These patents aren't doing that; if anything, they're doing the opposite.
I'm opposed to coming together and working out an arrangement because it presupposes these patents are acceptable. They are not. Software patents are so tremendously wrong that I think they're something that have to be opposed on general principal.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
First, you never lie or piss off a judge. Doing so is simply a sign of great incompetance, and when on does this anything short of total humiliation is a generous punishment. in this case, the judge did not want to deal with these fools any longer, and just wanted the parties to work it out.
Second, this stuff should not have gone to court. Again, given the incompetent behavior of RIM, I can only assume the entire negotiations were handled badly. Perhaps RIM thought they were a multibillion dollar company, so they could just intimidate the small party. Perhaps they can, but it always better to take the high road in these situations, expecailly when dealing with a widow. Instead of fighting and lying and trying to invalidate the patents, an initial payment might have been in order. I have no idea what went on behind doors, but, again, given the public record these people just seemed really stupid.
And finally, the 600 million must be taken in context. This is like a years EBITDA, and who knows what it will actually mean to RIM after the tax accountants get done. And, since they have been effectivelty saving for a few years, the impact on this year is like 2 months EBITDA.
So, I am not saying that the payment in the best situation, but given RIM lied in court, continued to anger the judge during negotiations, and was clearly trying to play a waiting game, probably hoping that the parties would continue to die off, it was not a horrible outcome.
A couple more thing to put this in context. I recall an invention, perhaps the steam engine and Watts, that was not fully patented because it borrowed patented technology and it was easier to hide the technology than share the credit. In the end this left the inventor wide open for the product to be copied. The inventor would likely have been better off making the technology transparent, honestly fighting the patent, and probably winning in the end.
The second case is standard insurance industry practice, which is reminiscent of what RIM was trying to do. In most settlements, the insurance company will withhold all payments, even in the most open a shut cases. They will offer a fraction of what the policy would indicate. The injured party can either accept the token payment, or wait the statuatory three years to file suit. The insurance company usually ends up the winner as most people cannot self fund the recovery effort, or the insurance company rightly states that the cost of litigation will be greater than the present settlement. RIM was playing exactly this game, and it is probabl as sad they they won at this game as it is that NTP won at the orignal patent dispute.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black