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Originally Posted by Ed Hansberry
I really don't understand this position. Are you saying that if I have a great idea and try to patent it but don't have the money to implement it, that it is ok for someone else to take my idea and captialize on it with no compensation to me? :?:
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No. I'm saying that if you simply file a patent for something and do nothing else but wait for someone to independently develop the same thing (without actually taking it from you) you shouldn’t be able to wait until they have saturated the market and then seek to profit from their hard work. That’s not what the patent system was intended for.
And in this case, NTP has plenty of money. As I understand it, they have investors and they buy up patents and pay expensive lawyers to grab money from others. The patent office was set up to encourage innovation by protecting inventors from competitors taking their “new and non-obvious” inventions. That’s not what I believe is happening in this case.
In the current system, the patent office doesn't have the ability to research patent claims, so they just issue patents for bogus claims and expect the courts to sort it out their messes. The problem is that the courts currently provide the benefit of the doubt to the patent holder, and it can take the patent office many years to revoke the patent. In this case, most of NTP’s patents that are part of their claim are now considered bogus by the patent office after a review. However, that is only a preliminary finding and until the patent office formally revokes the patents (and of course NTP has appealed the rulings) the judge considers the current status to be that the patents are valid. The patent office review process is years behind the court case.
So most likely RIM would prevail in this case if the parallel systems didn’t ignore each other. NTP has the advantage that the courts are moving faster than the patent office. I believe that the patent office will finally rule that the patents on which the cases stands are bogus. But by then, it will be years after RIM has already been forced to settle.
On the other hand, there has been statements by RIM that they have new products that get around the NTP patents. If this is the case, then what I think is happening is that RIM is just holding off as long as possible so that they can get their new products to market and then agree to the injunction. Then they can just tell NTP and their lawyers to “go pound sand.” :lol:
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