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I would begin my reminding everyone that the criminal and civil judicial systems are TOTALLY different. The basic principle behind the criminal law is the it's better to let a few guilty people go free (OJ) than to have an innocent person go to jail. Thus if someone is CONVICTED, you DO get to put in new exculpatory evidence and get a new trial in the criminal system. Which is why you get the occasional DNA evidence freeing falsly convicted person cases. The guiding principles are Fundamental justice and the search for the TRUTH (with a strong bias toward the defendant).
The civil law is based on the RULES of CIVIL PROCEDURE. Not JUSTICE. It's basically a game. File your papers late? You lose. Your case is thrown out no matter how worthy your cause was. RIM lost under the rules so they had to pay. Pretty simple. The issue of whether the patent rules suck is a separate one. I agree with everyone else (and I suspect that this includes Ed) that the patent laws do need to be changed. Whether this is a case of squatting or not, the current rules and review system create too much room for abuse.
The purpose of the current rules that allow for squatting were developed under the old industrial model. Under this system you could invent stuff and then not get ripped off just because necessary partners did not want to cooperate with you. A real life example is the creator of the intermittent windshield wiper. That poor sap created the technology when to the big three and then was summarilly turned away. Years later he went to the Japanese manufaturers who agreed to license his technology. If there was a use it or lose it rule, the big three could have turned the inventor away, waited few years and then used it themselves without paying the inventor a single penny. This would have been a tragedy and the lack of a use it or lose it rule is explained by this type of potential dynamic.
Frankly, I think that there should be a different type of patent system for high tech and biotech. They're totally different industries from the traditional business of the 19th and 20th centuries, and far more prone to patent abuse.
So for whether RIM paid a lot of money or not. They really didn't. The half a billion licensing fee was based on sales figures from four years ago. Over the last four years, RIM has grown astronomically. The 600 billion dollar settlement obviously took into consideration the fact that NTP's patents were on a weak footing.
If RIM really thought the patents were weak from the beginning they should sue their lawyers for ineffective assistance of counsel. They should have put pressure on the patent office for a review 8 years ago while the case was still winding through the courts rather than when they'd already lost the case and were desperately trying to figure out a way to survive without paying out any money. The patent office is pathetically understaffed but not so understaffed that they couldn't have looked at NTP's patents earlier. (big business should also use some of their considerable clout to get the patent office more resources. sometimes I think that LIKE the current state of chaos).
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