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The Real Inventor of Wireless Email?
theodp writes "The NY Times reports on Geoff Goodfellow, possibly the real inventor of wireless e-mail, who says NTP was concerned that his earlier work might undermine its patent claims and went to some lengths to ensure that it did not, including gagging Goodfellow during the RIM lawsuit. Not only did high-school dropout Goodfellow - who hung out as a teen in the lab of Doug Englebart -
describe wireless e-Mail in 1982, he implemented it in the early 1990's."
For a guy who has some great moral opposition to patents, he didn't seem to mind taking a 20k payoff to help a company exploit a patent to extort millions from RIM. Doesn't that seem a bit hypocritical to anyone else?
I get steamed when people suggest that every new combination of communications channel and message format is an invention. A new communications channel is an invention, and a new communication format is an invention, but merely thinking "hey, we could do that over this"?
I think not.
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
The first page should ample reason for research into claims that should result in this lawyer being disbarred and financially punished. For an officer of the court to intentionally conceal knowledge from the courts is a terrible terrible thing. In the first page, there is confirmation of prior art and conspiracy to conceal it.
For those reasons alone NTP should also have its relevant patents revoked and RIM shouldn't be paying a dime to them.
To me the most interesting part of the article was Yet another brilliant illustration why patents don't help independent inventors. Is there a site collecting all these stories?
Code is Speech. No to Censorship.
I mean, email was invented first, and I am sure someone has a patent for that. Just because the transport medium is wireless instead of over a wire, is there any validity in a patent for "wireless" email? If I had patented email, I would have said over ANY approrpirate digital transport, wired or wireless. Shouldn't the original email patent holder basically hold the patent for "wireless" email?
This is where patents break down, when people simply mash two patents together and feel they are justified for having a patent based on other people's work. Wireless communcations is patented, as well as the concept of email. Someone saying, hey, lets patent wireless-email should be shot.
I am sure there were inherent difficulties and specific problems that had to be resolved before making wireless email work properly, but come on. This is the application of two existing patented process, not the INVENTION of a new process.
This is why patents are failing to encourage innovation, because people with a law degree are simply taking combinations of other peoples inventions, mashing them together, and hoping that someone one day might use the right combination of inventions so they can sue them in courts for stealing their "innovation".
Patents are stifling innovation because they are being filed by people with no intention of developing the process, simply sitting on them until someone that actually makes the idea work is successful enough to earn them millions in a lawsuit for infringement.
Patents are shyster documents designed to make shysters richer.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Very few things are really done for the very first time.
A high-school dropout, Mr. Goodfellow had his light-bulb moment in 1982, when he came up with the idea of sending electronic mail messages wirelessly to a portable device -- like a BlackBerry.
Morse code to portable radios is WW I and field radios would qualify as a message over wireless to a portable device.
See Wiki wireless and note the part about telegraphs being sent.
The sum of it is this guy is a publicity whore and these patents are all frivolous so should be treated as such. Or perhaps it is more correct to say all these patents are patents on prior art. Take you pick, like NTP they are fraudsters.
"Mr. Wallace [the NTP lawyer] maintained that Mr. Goodfellow was retained because he had been mentioned in news articles from the early 1990's "regarding a product called RadioMail" -- his effort to commercialize the wireless e-mail idea -- but that Mr. Goodfellow "could not locate any documentation beyond these articles regarding the product.""
Wow, it's a good thing google wasn't around at the time to help.
Sheesh, I knew that RIM was getting some of their own medicine, so I was only partially sympathetic (both companies deserve a good legal slapping for pursuing such ridiculously obvious patents), but I had no idea NTP was THAT scummy. They knew about prior art. They hired the guy that was practically the embodiment of that prior art -- a guy that didn't merely have something on paper, but actually once ran a business on the principles NTP claimed to be a novel invention at the time of its patents. And they paid him to sign a contract to shut up.
Can this Mr. Wallace be disbarred for such unethical behaviour?
But you have to wonder how the heck it can be legitimate to knowingly surpress facts in a court case. Ahh well I have always felt these suits were what happen when people that should be honest criminals become lawyers.
Morse, Tesla, Marconi, Edison... And their patents already expired.
SMTP over packet radio? Decades ago, not just nineties.
There you are, staring at me again.
It looks hypocritical but it should be a lesson to all of us. First, they flattered him by remembering who he was. Then they just wanted to talk to him to learn more of that history. Then came the "standard" NDA. The alarm bells should have sounded, but he was too close to the picture to even imagine what he knew was hard to find out. You can only imagine what kind of threats they could have leveled at him after he signed. The lesson here is that NDAs are always anti-social and have the potential for greater harm than you might realize. I can only hope that this backfires bigtime on the lawyers. In the meantime, beware and seek independent legal help when things don't seem right. Hiding evidence sure sounds like a crime.
RIM will not comment on the situation because they too are restrained. As the fine article has it:
"The moral of the story is that for a long time now the patent system has been misused," said Mitchell D. Kapor, founder of the Lotus Development Corporation, the software publisher, and an adviser to Mr. Goodfellow in the early 1990's. "If it had been properly used, NTP would never have been issued its patents, and they never would have had a basis to pursue a lawsuit against R.I.M."
They had the basis and they extracted the payment and fear of an injunction is going to keep them quit, forever:
Although the NTP patents have been tentatively invalidated by the United States Patent Office, a jury upheld NTP's infringement suit in 2002, and R.I.M. chose to settle the legal fight for fear of a federal court injunction against its popular service.
Half of the burn you smell is provided by NDAs. Non disclosure is an enemy of the truth and that's where abuse happens.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.