RIM says, No lawsuits please, we're Canadian
posted January 24th 2005 10:24AM
Blackberry maker/dealer Research In Motion has come up with a clever new strategy to counter NTP's patent lawsuit — playing up their Canadian-ness. To get you up to speed: last year a federal court found that RIM had violated about a dozen of NTP's patents, ordering them to stop selling BlackBerry devices in the United States and pay NTP $53.7 million in damages. RIM managed to get another court to stay the order while they filed appeal, and last month an appeals court overturned the injunction barring them from selling BlackBerrys while upholding the most of the patent infrignement counts. Here's where it gets interesting. Since RIM's based in Canada, and so are their servers, they're now arguing that US patent laws don't apply to them. Seems unlikely that they'll be able to pull this one off, but they might be in luck—NTP might not even own those patents either. Yeah, this makes things hopelessly complicated now, but a company called Computer Leasco, Inc. is suing NTP for patent infringement, claiming that they're the ones that actually own the wireless email patents in question. Thus, RIM could still be in line for another lawsuit down the line—hang tough, guys.
RIM should be able to get away with it, as _US_ patent laws (note the emphasis) don't apply outside the US, despite what American lawyers would like everybody to believe.
I have a BB but listen to this.
The minute a product is sold in the USA, it needs to fall under US patent laws. Otherwise, i'll go find a patented product, move to canada, and sell it in the US and get around patent laws.
They are not overstepping their bounds (for once.)
It is 100% correct that U.S. patent laws apply to all good sold in the U.S. They can sell all they want in Canada.
And in this days of the WIPO / WTO regime, it's an especially ridiculous argument.
I wonder how much of RIM's sales are in Europe, though, and whether they can't at least keep those parts of the business free of this infringement matter?
Canada hasn't signed the WIPO.
I vote they have to give back the money they extorted from Handspring on their stupid thumboard patent.
I wonder how RIM is going to withstand the big guys. Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, Palm and Qualcomm all now have a Blackberry killer device and service.
Here's an in depth two page article on the subject.
"Mobile patents war shifts to email"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/29/mobile_email_patents_war/