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Troll scrounges for BlackBerries
January 2, 2006
The patent trolls are at it again, with one threatening to shut down the BlackBerry wireless e-mail service, should BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) not pay what financial columnist James Surowiecki calls "an enormous ransom." Surowiecki (writing in the December 25, 2005, & January 2, 2006, issue of the New Yorker; not available online) reports that this ransom, sought by a patent holding company called NTP, could reach $1 billion.
Surowiecki notes that innovation should be financially rewarded, but he adds, "Unfortunately, the real innovations in this case are not technological but legal." He writes that NTP "never tried to build a real business around its patents, and it never licensed them to others, until RIM demonstrated just how lucrative wireless e-mail could be."
Part of the problem besetting RIM lies with the US patent system, which grants too many, overly broad patents for ideas that are obvious. Surowiecki notes that 95% of all patent applications in the US are approved, vs. just 65% in Europe and Japan. Furthermore, he points out that an economist has found that "countries with patent laws (like Britain) did not innovate more than countries without them (like the Netherlands and Denmark)."
For its part, RIM has been willing to negotiate royalties with NTP despite serious doubts about the validity of NTP's patent portfolio. Jim Balsillie, RIM chairman and co-CEO, outlines the RIM position in an op-ed piece in the December 19 Wall Street Journal (subscription required).
Despite RIM's flexibility on the matter, however, he urges that "leaders in the private and public sector should re-examine how we reconcile an overburdened system with the emergence of litigious and avaricious groups like NTP that are in reality a debilitating drain on the economy and at odds with the constitutional purpose of the patent system."
As it stands now, the US patent office has issued preliminary findings declaring the NTP patents invalid. In the interest of technically and not legally innovative patents, let's hope RIM prevails, just as Cognex did against its own patent troll.
Posted by Rick Nelson on January 2, 2006 | Comments (0)
