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NTP Sues Verizon, AT&T, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile
An anonymous reader writes to tell us that following in the wake of their patent suit against Research in Motion (RIM), NTP has filed suit against Verizon, AT&T, Sprint Nextel, and T-Mobile for infringing on several patents. All of the patents in question relate to the delivery of email on mobile devices. "Five of the eight patents being used in the telco cases were the subject of NTP's 2001 patent suit against Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry. In November 2002, a jury found that RIM infringed upon NTP's patents. The case continued to make headlines until 2006, when RIM agreed to pay NTP a settlement of $612.5 million, nearly four years after RIM had first been found guilty of infringing on NTP's patents."
"they were allowed to rip off 600 million from a company that actually made it happen."
Excuse me, that's not what happened. RIM absolutely deserved to lose that $600M, through the sheer stupidity of their CEO. RIM GAVE that $600 Million away when they didn't have to.
First, RIM hires an utterly incompetent lawfirm to represent them. The defining moment of this case was when this lawfirm authorized a bogus demo of supposedly prior art andpresented this as evidence, but got caught. That pissed off the Judge to no end, and the case went downhill from there.
Then, just at the cusp of victory, when the U.S. Congress was set to act, and the Patent Office was set to act, RIM decided to fold and gave NTP $600 Million, setting everyone up for this next round of lawsuits.
Sorry, but RIM is a company of idiots, and deserves to lose every penny they get. And I'll bet their CEO still got a bonus for his actions.
Not really. A beeper sends messages entered from a phone numpad to the beeper. The NTP patent (I think, I haven't read it) covers email sent from a computer to an email address that is then forwarded to a phone. That's different from sending to a phone number.
These screwballs tried to hack a POCSAG pager to dump data to the AT&T Safari laptop in the late eighties or early nineties. When they failed to accomplish anything useful (because they were incompetent) AT&T went with the SkyTel Link, which was a superior pre-existing product which actually worked.
Wireless networking carrying all network traffic was developed at the University of Hawaii and was a precursor of the ARPA internet with the transport layer being the "ether". Other wireless ARPA subnets (PRNET and SATNET) were integrated into the internet on August 27, 1976, with a message originating in a mobile station connected via packet radio ot the landline ARPANET.
Information about the mobile network station originating that message has been preserved here. The first inter-network spanning message was, of course, an e-mail.
The various packet and satnet Class A domains are defined back to at least RFC790 issued in 1981, The infamous TCP:99 "metagram relay" port doesn't seem to appear until RFC820 in 1986,
Also of interest is Vint Cerf's RFC773 of October 1980.
http://rfc.net/rfc0773.html
Now GET OFF MY LAWN, ya snotty little whippersnappers.
Not entirely accurate. Take a look at this. Applications pre-June 8, 1995 were 17 years from issuance or 20 years from earliest claimed filing date, whichever came first. Today, it is 20 years from filing date, but you can get extensions on this if you application takes inordinantly long to process due to USPTO problems (namely the backlog of patents that is very long in some arts).