RIM wins a small victory in BlackBerry patent infringment case
We try to cap the number of time we spend obsessing over NTP's patent infringement suit against Research In Motion, the company behind the BlackBerry, to just four or five hours a day, but anyone who thought this was over when RIM agreed to pay NTP nearly half a billion of our American dollars to settle the back in March turned out to be very wrong. Since then we've seen the USPTO invalidate several of the patents in question (NTP is appealing), something which may have indirectly resulted in RIM digging in its heels and forcing the case back into the legal system. Anyway, whether or not their strategy will pay off remains to be seen (a court could order an injunction banning the sale of BlackBerrys in the US), but RIM did win a small legal victory today when an appeals court ruled overturned a lower court's finding that RIM had violated NTP's "method" patents. The bad news is that they still found that RIM had violated several of NTP's email "system" patents, so either this continues to drag out through the legal system or both parties will have to come back to negotiating table and hammer out a settlement that they can stick to.
