Posted on 03/03/2006 2:46:00 PM PST by July 4th
"WOW, extortion does pay after all! NTP was on life support after their claims were unraveling."
I could not agree more. I'm hoping that once the patents are invalidated, that RIM countersues NTP and gets its money back plus interest. I'm ashamed that the US court system is being used to hold companies hostage for large sums of cash especially since NTP produces nothing but seems to be set up only to hold patents and squeeze money out of people.
We do tend too often to just back into a corner and hurl insults. Its only fair and polite to at least acknowledge the quality of the argument being made, even if still disagreeing with it.
OK... so I read through some big chunks of the patent. Not the whole thing, as most of it is incomprehensible and I'm even a fairly technical type. I cannot imagine how a court could gain sufficient education on the topic to make head or tail of it. But I learned a few things.
I was wrong about the status. Of course the patent in question was in fact issued. It was not merely pending. This is an important matter because it does mean that there is something that somebody thought was specifically identifiable and patentable in the claims.
I may not have been completely fair in my characterization of NTP. I'll retract my disparaging remarks and "bottom-feeder" description at least for the moment. Clearly NTP believes they had a fair claim.
What I cannot tell, and I don't think further reading of the patent will help with, is whether the alleged infringement is valid. This patent (or set of associated patents) really is a scattershot that goes in many different directions. Some of the claims are just obscenely general and could be construed to be attempting to apply to whole hosts of new technologies from any sort of packetized radio to all forms of two-way paging. I cannot imagine that some of these really general claims are actually patentable.
There's precious little specificity about the actual hardware and software, other than diagrams of the arrangement of switching and servers. They don't appear to claim the actual hardware, but rather how they're hooked up. They don't appear to offer the actual software, but just a description of what such software (once developed) would do. That's a tough claim to make. An interesting and even potentially useful idea doesn't automatically become intellectual property. I'd be more impressed with a practical and deployable design than I am with mere descriptions of what a design might do.
It runs the risk of saying "Somebody could take a motor and connect it to a transmission and arrange it all on some wheels" and somehow claim credit for inventing a car.
This gets pretty close to that. I'm also persuaded that there was a whole lot of prior art going on with regard to packetized RF traffic and switching of paging networks.
So there I sit, no smarter than I was when I started. I honestly have no idea whether any of these claims are valid, and so I'll back off the vitriol a couple of notches, but I'm not convinced either.
What RIM really nailed and the reason they've overtaken the market so well is the reason that I hope they continue to be successful: They got the interface to Exchange Server nailed. They did that better than anybody else. It isn't the RF packets that make the difference, it is that interface that gives them the advantage. Others like Good Technology (who do use a license of NTP's patent) can do the RF traffic too, but without the seamless integration with Exchange it is just another two-way pager. I don't need that. I need it to be fully integrated with Exchange.
Of course this patent doesn't touch on that layer. It's all about the more downstream components of the RF components of the network. I'm not convinced that RIM did anything wrong or intentially stole any IP. If anything, NTP is profiting now *not* so much off of their own idea, but off of RIM's better implementation of a wholly different area of the art. That part bugs me.
Sorry, but the facts are that NTP's patent was not an "original" idea, reread the article about Norway. Secondly, the US patent office is in the process of invalidating the patents, so there must be something there.
Just because it does not fit your mold, does not make it any less of a fact. NTP is in the business of extortion and I do hope that RIM will get its money back after the patents are thrown out.
And BlackBerry settled because???
If their lawyers thought this was a realistic they'd merely wait for this to happen or hold on a bit longer for NTP to go belly up.
In the Wall Street Journal today, the wonderful Weekend Edition, RIM explained that the courts were not going to wait for the patent office and they were facing an injunction that would shut down their business with the prospect of a tricky work around. It was extortion at its best. Pay up or get your business shut down for a time.
By the way, one of the founders of NTP was a patent lawyer. Makes you wonder about NTP's purpose as a company. They make no products and seems it was formed simply to hold dubious patents that will eventually be overturned by the Patent Office.
I've seen some of the terms of the deal in the paper. This million dollar payoff does not include any future payments. Does that make you wonder why? Maybe NTP knows that its patents are doomed in the future and got what it could while it could. Again, extortion at its best. A grubby patent lawyer and the widow of the "inventor". I put inventor in quotes because I still don't believe it was an original idea...that evidence can be found in Norway.
The one thing that the RIM boss said was that he wished it had been written into the agreement that RIM could its money back after the patents are overturned, he even stated he would have paid more money with that clause in the agreement, but NTP wouldn't go for it....so I guess that shows how sure they are of their own chances at the patent office.
I'm sure RIM knew that they would win in the patent office, but due to rules and procedures, NTP could have tied up the patent office for years with appeals and the courts already stated that they would not wait for the patent office to finish its job.
You can look at it from a hundred angles, but it still is nothing but old fashion extortion.
The claims and technojargon of the patents are pretty much over my head, as well. I largely base my belief that RIM did in fact infringe the claims, on the fact that NTP was able to make that case successfully in court. And yes, that's an oversimplistic view of the case, indeed our legal system, but there it is. I'm drawn to the case but I don't have time to dig THAT deeply into it.
Finally, something you may already know: Infringement doesn't require an exact implementation of the package; it just requires an implementation of one claim. "Preferred embodiments" are really just explanations of possible ways in which the claimed technology could be implemented. This is how it's possible that RIM created an entirely different package of the art than anything described in the patents' preferred embodiments, and still clearly infringed the claim(s).
I went through that specific issue myself: The infringers shifted some shapes and colors around and claimed their product was different enough from my preferred embodiments as to not constitute infringement. They also challenged the validity of the patent and its claims, on multiple grounds. I was David staring into the face of multiple Goliaths, which is undoubtedly a factor in why the principles of this case hold so much interest for me. I was just one little guy who came up with a cool idea and turned it into something real. I couldn't afford a patent attorney, so I wrote the utility patent specification myself and prosecuted it through the PTO to completion without the aid of an attorney. Within days of our product hitting the market, cheap knockoffs showed up at half our price. I asked them to stop and they basically shooed me like a gnat.
Thanks for the discussion...
MM
Well, a jury did rule for NTP.
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