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.
Over-hyped nonsense (Score:4, Interesting)
Alternatives (Score:5, Interesting)
And I don't mean "roll your own" setups, but full fledged enterprise level products.
RIM can't be the only company that offers such a service.
Patnets brought to their logical conclusion (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Confused about why suit persists. (Score:5, Interesting)
This whole case is an amazing example of bureaucracy at 'work'.
Re:Over-hyped nonsense (Score:3, Interesting)
You believe them? I'm not sure I do. We don't know the exact details because of the NDAs but given it's 8 patents it sounds like a massive piece of work to me, presumably it could mean changing the device firmward on every device and changing the backend at the same time.
Even if they do have a technical solution, a large change to a massive live system like this, it's likely carries a very high risk.
Totally rediculous given the patents have all but been thrown out.
Lets say for a moment... (Score:4, Interesting)
The potential impact of this may mean the shutdown of Blackberry's network.
Surely this would not mean that the Blackberry network would be shutdown? Am I naive to think that this would instead mean that RIM's value would decend constantly, nobody would want to buy them EXCEPT for NTP, who would buy them at rock bottom prices and then aquire the network and most importantly the customer base (ie. high pressure money pipe) which goes with it?
"The" law seems to be grossly manipulated by good actors (plaintiffs, lawyers, attorneys, barristers, witnesses, etc) who work it for nothing but money. It seems that rather than seeing themselves needing to defend their property, they instead see opportunity to take someone elses "in the name of defending their own".
Blackberry "service"? (Score:3, Interesting)
Many folks in my office have Blackberry phones with the Nextel 2-way service, but our service is provided through Nextel. As far as I know, we are billed directly by Nextel and don't have a "Blackberry service", which leads me to believe that the Blackberry service in question here isn't exactly what I think it is.
Re:US Patent System is more important than Crackbe (Score:3, Interesting)
Too bad (Score:5, Interesting)
American Government Unaccoutable (Score:3, Interesting)
wow, thank you.
I find that utterly amazing. Up here in in the Great White North (Canada) people can and do sue the government. There have been several wrongful murder convictions and there was the whole Native schools thing for which the federal government did have to deliver financial compensation.
I am generally critical about the Americans predisposition to sue. However, not being able to sue an authority which misused it's power, (however well intentioned) is quite scary.
Considering the purpose of tort law (as I understand it) is to compensate for injustice, not to punish, I think it shows yet another way in which Americans are less free than other democracies. Their Government is actually allowed to abuse its own people.
Re:Patnets brought to their logical conclusion (Score:3, Interesting)
Not if the whole point of inventing the machine was to sell it for profit.
and maybe even a "first mover" advantage if you run a company
If you go bankrupt because your neighbor watches you from his window and then sells an identical device for 1/2 the cost, that first mover advantage doesn't mean anything, and would very likely be an advantage of less than one day.
Not a global monopoly who locks everyone else out
That's not the purpose of a patent. The purpose is to convince the guy in his garage that he will be able to recoup the R&D costs, so that he will share it with the public. Patents were supposed to be reasonably short lived, so that an inventor would actually have to keep inventing to make a living from it.
It's not "protection", because in a patent free world you are more free to copy and improve on other inventions too. In a patent world, big companies have more resources to lock you out, then you have to lock them out, it'd be foolish to believe otherwise.
You're far too naieve about the honesty and ethics of corporate executives. The problem isn't the institution of patents, it's the implementation. The two problems are the length of patents, and the lax attitude that patent examiners have for granting patents. A patent should be difficult to get, only for something truly new and unique and very specific. Not for adding "on the internet" to a business method that's been in use for decades. You should also be required to actually build and distribute the invention. Also, if patents were only valid up until the point where the inventor had recouped their documented R&D costs, that would alleviate most of the problems.
Take pharmaceuticals as an example industry. The medicines developped are necessary and beneficial to the public interest. They take billions of dollars to develop. Who's going to pay for that if they can't recoup the costs? It would have to be a government subsidized program. I don't believe socialized medical research produces the same quality as what we get with private industry. So you offer a limited monopoly to recoup the costs, and once that has happened the information becomes public domain and everybody gets the benefit not only the medecines, but the reduced cost resulting from a competetive free market.
Make no mistake, I'm not saying what we currently have in place for patents is a good system. But it could be with some significant changes.
Re:Our system of law allows and even encourages th (Score:3, Interesting)
To make your points for you, I'll take a closer look at the case of NTP. In principle, they are fulfulling an important economic function: buying obscure patents and filing infringement lawsuits based on them make them money, but also makes money for the inventors from whom the patents were bought (who probably can't afford to sue RIM!). Also, there's strength in numbers -- and it's possible that NTP bought patents from several inventors, who probably won't have filed suit together otherwise.
The reason this feels wrong to you (and me) is that it's likely that NTP paid the inventors much less that what they are about to make from the lawsuit. This says nothing about NTP (who are simply trying to profit from the system as much as possible), but tell us a lot about the system. What this tell us is that the most important ingredient in the lawsuit was provided by NTP, or in other words, that you can lawyering $100m out of a patent is easier than developing a product worth $100m from it. In my opinion this comes from two deplorable problems in the USA:
Re:You're missing the point of patents! (Score:3, Interesting)
Lets start with enforcing foreign held patents. If you enforce foreign held patents on local companies, then effectively you're taxing local businesses and harming local customers, for no benefit to your nation. If you're a non first world country, then likely your research funding is retarded by all the existing patents coming from first world nations. Take existing AIDS treatments; sub-saharan african countries were unable to afford to buy patented medicines, or to make them themselves due to the high costs. Since they couldn't afford the drugs, people died for lack of treatment. They're not going to be able to work the system the other way, as the patent infrastructure is such that those who got there first effectively have monopolies forever, as they build on existing broad patents and extend them permanently.
Your argument is that without those high patent fees, private businesses have no incentive to create treatments at all. That's partially true. The biggest incentive patents provide is not to provide cures at all, as someone ceases to need their drugs after treatment. Much better for their bottom line to incrementally improve drugs (taking new patents each time) that only treat symptoms, as you'll have a user of your drug for years, if not the rest of their life. Equally, much more effective to create drugs that make the most money, such as viagra-style drugs or other 'lifestyle' drugs. That's not to say these drugs have no value, but they make a lot more money, and so get a lot more reasearch attention by big companies than they deserve on a true scale of medical importance and suffering.
Now - how much money is spent by healthcare companies, medical insurance and nationalised healthcare on expensive patented drugs? In the UK, the biggest cost for the National Health Service (centrally tax funded), in total, is the drugs. Not the hospitals, not the staff, the drugs. Now imagine that drugs couldn't be patented in the UK, and all that money was spent on government research for drugs that was freely published.
No money wasted on legal enforcement, marketing (which private drug companies spend HUGE amounts on), or shareholder profits. You'd end up with more money spent on research, and better, faster treatments than getting private companies to do it, even assuming private business is more efficient. There'd still be oppotunities for private businesses to be hired to do the research directly by the government, rather than them making profit from the results. And meanwhile, you have the government and medical insurance with the whiphand, whose primary goal is to get their patients cured, rather than make a profit on the treatments.
Now, our arguments boil down to 'socialist' government spending rather than private 'free enterprise' - and that argument will be ongoing for a very long time, as frankly both have their plusses. I'm just pointing out that there are alternative ways to bring about innovation, and that patent monopolies can be very inefficient at producing the best solutions for the least cost, over the long term as well as the short term.