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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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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.
I think I've gotta get me one of them patent thingies.
...we could be next. Larry Lessig makes the point of saying that stuff like this and SCO is only the tip of the iceberg. We need patent reform. Larry Lessig urges people to spend say the equivalent of what you would spend supporting the copyright cartel on a monthly basis by giving to the org of your choice to fight this kind of stuff. So if your Comcast bill is $75.00, maybe you could squeeze out that much for the EFF.org, etc.
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.
The industry and millions of consumers are breathing a collective sigh of relief tonight.
Despite averting a BlackBerry shutdown, however, this case is just more proof that the US Patent Office is in crisis. While some of NTP's patents may prove to be valid, it is clear that many of them should never have been granted in the first place.
The US Patent Office's failure to ensure quality threatens the patent system that is so critical to innovative small tech firms. If the quality of patents is not improved, the industry may lose faith in the entire system.
Some may not like software patents, but the reality is that companies have them. Open Source Champion IBM is the single largest patenter in the WORLD. they still make billions (with a b) off of patent licensing - including software/method patent licensing. Small companies like 'slingbox' have patents to ensure that they get VC funding and to prevent Sony from just creating the exact same product and steamrolling them.
I, 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.
The quality issue MUST be solved, and NOW; so before you launch into a general "patents suck" rage, take a reality check and think about ways to get more prior art into the patent system and improve the quality.
It will be several years before patent reform legislation becomes law, so we are going to to have to find technology solutions that we can implement now, and hope that legislation fixes the things we can't.
Morgan Reed
A sig?!? I don't think so.....
The one good thing to come of this is it has raised the problem in the public eye. Congressmen thought they would lose their Blackberries. Let's hope some real reform is on the way.
Everyone knows that damage is done to the soul by bad motion pictures. -Pope Pius XI
is a patent troll with $600M in the bank.
Do you have ESP?
The action to invalidate NTP's patents continues, so NTP won't be able to do this to other vendors. The flawed legal & patent systems led to this resolution. RIM basically had two choices: 1) risk the injunction (which would have been a death sentence for the Blackberry business, no matter what workarounds they had) or 2) pay them to shut up, and rest easy knowing the customers won't be left high and dry because of an injunction.
The GPL pretty much bound IBM to not settle. If there are patent restrictions on the code, then it cannot be used, therefore IBM had to fight it. Just another reason why I prefer stronger copyleft licenses over weaker ones.
This couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of bottom-feeding scumbuckets. Don't forget that RIM (or "Lawsuits in Motion" as El Reg dubbed them) was the group of clowns who sued Palm and others for daring to infringe on their breathtakingly innovative concept of putting a little keyboard on a PDA. Screw 'em. Screw 'em right up the arse with a pile-driver, 10 metres of razor wire, and a bottle of vinegar. And whether you love software patents or hate them, this event is a rare conjunction of equal parts schadenfreude and poetic justice.
Now we just have to wait a few years for the NTP <descriptions containing far too much vitriol to ever be displayed publicly> to get their peckers handed to them in thin slices. It'll be worth it.
After shelling out $612M over this, spending another $100M on a massive PR campaign to get the public and Congress behind tearing up the whole patent system and starting over will seem like a gratuity.
Keep in mind, the House and Senate (not to mention damn near every federal agency imaginable) use Blackberry, so they're already on their side and will probably be more than happy to make life $612M easier for RIM over time.
By settling, RIM now has a license to "patented" technology. So their competitors still have to worry about patents claimed by NTP (and RIM). If RIM had kept fighting to the end and actually won they (and their competitors) would have no IP claim to the technology.
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!
I love how the big company always gets the benefit of the doubt in today's corporate-loving world.
The founder of NTP had many years of wireless experience, and developed many technologies that moved wireless messaging forward. When RIM showed up on the scene, he sent them (as well as some other companies) a few letters to inform them that they were infringing on his patents. RIM ignored the letters, and continued doing business as though they had never heard of this guy. He didn't sue, he just chalked it up to a losing battle that there was nothing he could do anything about.
Then he saw a story about how RIM was suing other companies out of existence using patents that were infringing on HIS patents. At that point he figured it was time to try and get a big law firm involved, and went after RIM. He died of cancer before this whole court case was ever finished, but I am glad to hear his family will be well off.
The fact of the matter is, this never would have even happened if RIM hadn't started the whole thing by employing predatory practices with their dubious patents to drive competition out of business in the first place. I have no sympathy for RIM at all. They flat out lied in court, and were busted for it, they used some pretty questionable lobbying practices to get NTP patents invalidated, and they have practiced far more dubious patent extortion than NTP ever did. I don't think this is a case of a fine, upstanding company getting a shakedown by a troll. This is a case of pretty sweet karma in action!
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.
RIM was wise to settle.
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.
What bothers me in this entire process is that NTP was composed entirely of the inventor and a lawyer. So for much of this case, it's been just a lawyer.
The most foolish thing though is that I believe RIM could have settled this case for far smaller sum early on, but now its 600M and probably something similar again in lawyers fees and business damage.
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
Actually, Campana's company Telefind did have working products, albeit prototypes, exhibited at Comdex in 1990. There weren't terrible reliable - as the networks weren't either, only one way email to pagers but they worked. AT&T was online as primary customer but ducked out leaving Telefind high and dry. Campana inherited tha patents after a lawsuit against Telefind."Mr. Narayanan liked Telefind's products, thinking they might fit well with the Safari project. AT&T had an e-mail system and a prototype computer; what it lacked was a paging service that could put the two together. But after a year of flirting with Telefind, even demonstrating Telefind's system at the Comdex computer show in Las Vegas, AT&T opted for a larger partner in Skytel." RIM's 800 and 900 series pagers were released in 1990 - well after Telefind. Mind you they were true 2-way pagers operating on Motorola's wireless packet Mobitel network. What brought on the NTP lawsuit was RIM's own arrogance in suing othe companies like Palm for having the audacity to incorporate tiny keyboards in their products. C'mon RIM! Who's the troll now?
Yes, here.
http://outcampaign.org/