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Originally Posted by DaleReeck
I actually agree with this wholeheartedly, that you must do something with a patent. If you own a patent and don't do anything with it, then you are holding back technological advancement and society as a whole in the name of greed. As the old saying goes, "sh1t or get off the pot". If you don't do anything with it, then give it to someone who will. By "doing something with it", this includes coming to an agreement to share with someone who will. That is perfectly acceptable if this intention is clear from the start. If NTP had gone out looking for partners to work on this, all would be fine. But they didn't. They just waited. To lie in wait, then ambush someone with a patent violation as NTP has done is immoral and wrong. Legal, but wrong.
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I think this attitude would be acceptable in a perfect world where people will help people. But it seems that the law give someone the right to sit on his patent for as long as he is able to.
It would have been nice if NTP would have started screaming that RIM was using their patent without paying license fees. Maybe they did I really don't know but if it's legal then NTP can do it. Slimy but they can do it.
I would think that the patent law should be revised (if it doesn't state it already) that there is a grace period to scream patent infringement at an offending company. After that time limit is up the patent holder would loose its rights to the patent. This would protect against a company waiting in ambush until the infringing company is rolling in money. That would seem to fix most of the issues being discussed here. And this doodo or get off the pot paradigm would force companies to get off their butts and develop what bought or loose it :wink: .
Jeff-