User: cletman

RIM's own doing

On: Supreme Court spurns RIM

If anyone follows the case, the whole situation could have been avoided by RIM. They played harball from beginning. I have been in amny situations where big companies get away with anything and screw the hell out of small companies. They even make up LIES. For 10000 such violations, one company like RIM gets accountable. I have no sympathy for RIM. They dug their own grave. http://www.law.com/jsp/printerfriendly.jsp?c=LawAr ticle&t=PrinterFriendlyArticle&cid=1126688711482

A classic tactic in a patent infringement case where a deep-pocketed defendant is sued by a poorer plaintiff dictates that the former drag out the proceeding as long as possible. The idea is to spend the plaintiff into the ground and force a settlement on favorable terms for the defendant. As long as the defendant can hold the threat of an injunction at bay, the biggest downside is the possible payment of a reasonable royalty for use of the plaintiff's patents. "From a defendant's standpoint," Wallace explains, "if you can get into a district where the docket is very slow, go years and years, well, [the defendant] can basically stretch it out and avoid the threat." A major thrust of RIM's defense during the 13-day trial was an attempt to show that there was prior art that invalidated NTP's patents. Some of the most dramatic testimony dealt with a wireless device developed in the late 1980s by TekNow, a paging and computer engineering company based in Phoenix. David Kenney, TekNow's founder, was asked by RIM lawyer Mark Nelson, an associate at Jones Day, if the company's device was capable of sending e-mail in 1989. "Yes, that's what we were doing, delivering e-mail to a pager," Kenney replied. To demonstrate the TekNow system to the jury, Kenney typed into a computer this message: "Tommy, the deal is closed." A moment later, with a beep and few squawks, a TekNow pager printed out the message. Then, with a final flourish, Nelson presented the message to the jury. On cross-examination, however, Kenney acknowledged that the size of two of the software programs employed in the demonstration matched ones the company had produced in 1994 and 1997. Software from the 1980s, which TekNow had sent to RIM's legal department to set up the demonstration, did not work, Kenney said he was told by a RIM official. Kenney had then provided RIM's legal department with the later software to RIM, he said. In pushing on to trial, RIM might simply have miscalculated how strong a defense it could muster. RIM's initial response to NTP's patent claims was dismissive. A letter sent by NTP's first set of lawyers at Hunton & Williams in November 2000 had invited RIM to license NTP's patents, alluding pointedly to the possibility of infringement. Enclosed with the letter were some pages printed out from RIM's Web site, which "did not readily demonstrate any support for potential patent infringement," the Canadian company explained in a news release after NTP filed suit. A letter from Jones Day to NTP's lawyers in February 2002 seemed to capture the disdain with which RIM's lawyers viewed the patent-holding company's arguments, at least at first. The letter warned that Jones Day was contemplating a motion under rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, contending that NTP had such a weak case that it had brought suit without a good-faith basis to do so. Jones Day never filed the motion, according to NTP lawyer James Wallace.