Supreme Court spurns RIM 336
l2718 writes "NTP has just won the latest round in its court battle against Research in Motion (makers of the Blackberry). Today's
Order List from the US Supreme Court includes a denial of certiorary for RIM's appeal. This follows the Circuit Court of Appeals' denial of review en banc we have covered previously. As sometimes happens, the court nevertheless accepted amicus curiae briefs from several groups, including Intel and the Canadian government." The potential impact of this may mean the shutdown of Blackberry's network. I hope the crackberry addicts have lots of methadone onhand.
Confused about why suit persists. (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.engadget.com/2005/12/20/uspto-calls-ri
I believe that the USPTO hasn't ruled yet, but given that they've announced that they will rule in favor of RIM, I don't know how NTP could enforce an injuction against RIM.
Re:Alternatives - NotifyLink (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Alternatives- GoodLink (Score:3, Informative)
www.good.com
SCOTUS Order (Score:3, Informative)
RTFA idiot !!!! (Score:2, Informative)
NTP is not a patent buying outfit - it was founded by an engineer who
actually built and demonstrated techology prototypes back in 80's and early 90's.
He died of cancer last year.
If you, my little moron, work on something for 5 years, build some prototype technology, patent it and then something bad happens to you, e.g. you get cancer and die, do you want some large corporation just start using your patented technology for free, just because you are sick and cannot build it yourself on scale ?
Think about it for a while, my little slashdot moron !
Re:Because it is the right thing to do.. (Score:4, Informative)
This is a truly insightful comment:
The patents HAVE been granted and the courts are obligated to protect them. It's like making up rules for a game and then in the middle deciding which rules are and are not going to be enforced.
This is exactly the same as the Supreme Court deciding in favor of the City of New London, Connecticut in Kelo v. City of New London [washingtonpost.com] which has raised considerable furor and activism [seacoastonline.com] in one Justice's home town. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in the majority opinion: "The court should not 'second-guess' local governments ..." and neither ought it to "second-guess" the federal government in this case.
We have a Constitutional right to petition our government for redress in this area of patent. We are grumbling about this presently but I don't see any marches on Washington by geeks like us who want to demand changes to the law.
I also don't see an amicus brief on our behalf, either.
alternatives! (Score:3, Informative)
If you want something that "just works", get a Danger Hiptop from T-Mobile: it's cheaper and a lot nicer than the Blackberry ever was.
Otherwise, the Palm Treos are the obvious choice. Use IMAP for mail, with the new mail notification extension and you get all the Blackberry features and a lot more.
Finally, the Nokia communicators look nice, although I haven't used one regularly. The bluetooth-only model looked like a nice compromise between power and size; there'll probably be an updated version soon that gives you 802.11 in the small form factor as well. Again, IMAP is the way to go for mail.
Re:Sue the USPTO (Score:5, Informative)
However, there is an exception, called the Federal Tort Claims Act [lectlaw.com], which allows people to sue the Government for negligence in some situations:
The Government would have a pretty easy argument in this case that the USPTO's function is "uniquely governmental" in that it enforces a duty of the Government that's enumerated in the Constitution (that whole "useful arts" bit that always gets dragged up). Whether or not they do their job well doesn't enter into it -- the intended method of influencing the Government's performance is through the ballot box, not the jury box.
This is also the reason why you can't sue the Government if you were wrongly accused of murder and held in prison for 20 years before being exonerated by DNA evidence or something. The Government was doing its job (however poorly), therefore you can't sue it/them.
Re:Blackberry "service"? (Score:3, Informative)
Your company has a box (Blackberry Enterprise Server) which hooks into Exchange or Lotus Notes. All [configured] email is forwarded over an encrypted link over the Internet (a VPN of sorts, if you like) to RIMs headquarters in Waterloo, Canada. As I understand it, it is the local BES software that strips out attachements and formatting etc to shrink the message as much as possible.
Meanwhile your Blackberry device opens an encrypted connection over GPRS to RIM, through your cellular provider and out over a dedicated IP on Frame Relay link.
Email arrives in Waterloo, where they forward it back to your device.
Voila!
Confusion and misinformation abounds (Score:3, Informative)
First, as far as I can tell, the NTP patents are valid. The original inventor Thomas Campana did, indeed invent and demonstrate the first wireless email solution. Campana built prototypes to demonstrate the proof-of-concept and filed for and received patents. He did everything he was supposed to do, from a patent perspective. He was unable to market-ize the solution because there was not sufficient infrastructure, at the time, to support a market. Campana notified a number of companies, including RIM that he held the patents on the invention and was looking for support to product-ize.
RIM, like most companies, ignored this notification. Unlike most others, RIM went on to build a product based on Campana's invention and then refused to pay him royalties. Campana started to try and litigate, however he didn't have enough money or energy because he was suffering from cancer. He co-founded NTP with a lawyer friend to follow through with the litigation.
The reason that the US patent office is reconsidering the patents has nothing to do with the validity of the patents and everything to do with political pressure from the Canadian and US governments, as well as a number of large corporate investors that have a lot to lose. Politics!
Campana has already lost. He died of cancer, never receiving the monies or credit that he was due.
NTP continues to fight the battle as a matter of principle. The are not simply some law firm trying to get rich off of someone else's ideas. They are trying to force RIM to do the right thing and to send out a warning that being big doesn't entitle a company to steal.
People are so eager to believe that it's always the lawyers that that are evil. Unfortunately, in our zeal to blame the lawyers, we sometimes find ourselves on the wrong side of the fight! Sometimes the lawyers do fight real injustices.
ps
I'm not a lawyer - I'm an engineer, so my bias is in favor of Thomas Campana and anyone wanting to protect their original inventions!
Re:The waste is underhyped. (Score:4, Informative)
Don't feel too warm and fuzzy for NTP (Score:5, Informative)
"During reexaminations, the USPTO built detailed cases against NTP patent claims developed largely from information contained in other U.S. patents. The USPTO found that U.S. patent 5,159,592 by inventor Charles E. Perkins, assigned to IBM, anticipated many claims in the NTP patents and was filed earlier than any of them. NTP has apparently been unable to show to the satisfaction of the USPTO that its inventions were documented or demonstrated before the Perkins patent held by IBM was filed.
The October 26, 1990, date claimed for ESA's [the prior owner of NTP's patents] demonstration to AT&T could be significant, because the Perkins patent application was filed October 29, 1990. However, according to the Telefind memo, what was demonstrated then was a "wireless modem to download data and messages" and not the more complex system of e-mail processing and routing that is described in the patents under review.
U.S. patent 5,278,955 deals with e-mail processing and cites an article from 1989 by Richard D. Verjinski entitled, "PHASE, a portable host access system environment," published in an IEEE proceedings. The USPTO found Verjinski's article anticipated many NTP patent claims.
Besides the Perkins patent and the Verjinski article, the USPTO found several other prior publications describing techniques claimed in NTP patents, including a RIM patent and documents published by Norwegian Telecommunications in 1986 and 1989. For many of the NTP patent claims it now proposes to reject the USPTO cites multiple prior disclosures.
Until recent years U.S. patent applications were not published. NTP inventors would have been unable to learn about the Perkins patent application when they applied for the first three of the eight patents now being reexamined. However, the Verjinski article was published before any NTP patent application, and the Perkins patent had been published before applications for the last five NTP patents were filed.
The USPTO has assembled substantial evidence that critical NTP patent claims are invalid. Despite persistent attempts by RIM to intervene in the reexaminations, the USPTO has generally built its own cases without accepting arguments advanced by RIM. So far the USPTO has not explained why the NTP claims now being rejected were instead accepted when the NTP patent applications were originally examined.
NTP has made some adjustments in response to the USPTO findings but is attempting to justify and maintain most if not all of its claims. If the USPTO follows through with final actions rejecting any claims not conceded or adjusted by NTP, NTP has available to it both administrative and court appeals, likely to take many years."
Re:Confusion and misinformation abounds (Score:1, Informative)
However, I still disagree that he should have ever been given a patent in the first place. Lots of people long before Mr. Campana solved the problem of sending digital data over wireless channels. Usually at telecoms or cell phone providers or radio companies or NASA or at Cisco and Linksys, etc. Sending digitial data over wireless is an interesting problem and it almost guarentees a non-obvious and novel solution.
But once that process of sending digital data is solved, whether it is used for sending e-mail, web pages, MP3 files, JPEGs, IRC chat messages, encoded voice transmissions, or nearby seismic activiy recordings, its all the same, and none of them should ever be granted individual patents.
Re:Patnets brought to their logical conclusion (Score:3, Informative)
Like what? If you ask me (or anybody else) to invest in a project, you've got to be able to show me how you're going to get a return. For products (like pharmaceuticals and software) where the cost of the first product (pill or CD) is very high, but the cost of the 2nd through nth is virtually zero, you've got to have some way of giving the people who invest the upfront capital to develop the product the chance to earn a return on that product.
Patents ain't perfect, by any means, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a need for a way to provide incentives to investors.
Re:Push mail on Exchange 2003? (Score:2, Informative)
The original version of the push technology used specially crafted SMS messages to trigger the phone in to doing a sync. (i.e. the SMS message never showed up in your inbox, it was eaten by the software, nor was the email message actually included in the SMS itself) This means that with a cellular company that charges you for incoming SMS messages you may end up having to pay for them. Some of the cell companies put filters in place so that you didn't get charged for these system type messages.
The newer version of direct push [microsoft.com] no longer relies on SMS messages, so you don't have to worry about paying text messaging fees.
Personally, I like to just set my device to a scheduled sync (every 5 to 10 minutes) which is just as effective really.