Patents have gone berserk in the last twenty years, the
USPTO
has allowed business model patents, software patents, and even just methodology patents. It has made a mess and mockery of the patent process, to the point where patents are an inhibition to innovation, and instead are used for extortion, and monopoly.
RIM vs NTP
I have been involved off and on with a project which was dedicated to giving field technicians access to all the data that the central offices have, so they can make timely decisions, and also so the services to completion was expedited. We tried iPaqs, J2ME phones, until finally the Blackberry matured sufficiently that we could have the techs access the information through the same website that the central offices do. The Blackberry also replaced our phones, pagers, and old phone plans. Massive cost saving. I am a fan of the Blackberry.
However, the Blackberry is under a patent cloud. An intellectual property company, NTP, is suing RIM for patent infringement, in what has been an ongoing court case.
NTP is one of a new brand of companies
that have popped up with the weakening of the USPTO's restriction on what sorts of patents can pass;
Indeed, NTP does not make anything. It is a patent holding company formed by in 1992 by Thomas J. Campana and some investors with the intent of licensing patents. Mr. Campana, 57, is a retired electrical engineer and entrepreneur from the Chicago area who holds about 50 patents, some of which cover a national paging system.These companies buy up weak patents, and sit on them, knowing that a company is likely infringing on it. Once that company, such as RIM, is well established, and had considerable market penetration, the intellectual property company will turn to litigation. These intellectual property company are litigious by nature. But we expect laws to be universal, and apply universally - if the litigation is upheld, and RIM is removed from the US market by the courts because of their patent infringement - then surely it applies to the US government as well? It seems not .
In this ongoing patent infringement case involving the Canadian RIM's BlackBerry system, the U.S. Government has submitted a brief to District Court Judge Spencer. The brief notes that under Trojan v. Shat-R-Shield, the Federal Government cannot be enjoined against using a patented invention and thus, asks the court to fashion any injunction in such a way to continue to allow the U.S. Government workers to continue to use the BlackBerry.But that is not all, the USPTO is having second thoughts too, and NTP's litigious nature is being shown .
The US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has rejected seven out of eight claims made by NTP against Research in Motion's (RIM) BlackBerry service, throwing a legal settlement between the two companies into further turmoil. The patent office issued what it calls "non-final office actions" rejecting all the claims in two of NTP's patents, on the heels of a preliminary rejection notice for the claims in five of the patents earlier this year. Only one of the key patents at issue in the dispute over the BlackBerry service now contains valid claims in the eyes of the patent office, but that patent is under review as well.What a mess. Patents and their enabling legislation have produced weird outcomes in the past, and the weirdness is only getting worse as it seems weaker and weaker patents are let through the patent office. Sun had a bizarre case with Kodak ;
The really significant part of that though, is that so much of the world has gotten tied up in knots over ridiculous pieces of litigation. I mean, Sun just came out of this really weird patent case with Kodak, where Kodak admitted that we did not violate their patent. They weren't't accusing us of violating their patent, they were accusing us of building a system that caused other people to violate their patent. So they had an expert who wrote software that violated their patent, and he actually got up in court and said that every program ever written does the following completely stupid stuff, and therefore Java induced people to violate their patent. And the jury made up of housewives bought it. And it's like, "What is this, you know, Shakespeare with rights? It's like five hundred years later, why didn't we pay attention and just shoot all the lawyers?".Patents are more often than not used for extortion. I am sceptical of the patent system being maintained, and will need to see a massively convincing argument for it to remain. Especially when we know co-operative and democratized innovation is a faster commodifier of innovation than the patent system. cam
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