After a string of wins in court, BlackBerry maker Research-In-Motion had whittled the patents-in-suit from sixteen down to just five… and these were rejected upon the first re-examination by the US Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO). So why on earth would RIM pay patent holder NTP Incorporated over US$612 million?
It boils down to time. The re-examination and appeal process can stretch out for years. Squashed between skittish investors and customers, RIM settled.
Media accounts have largely insinuated that NTP’s patents are frivolous. As the patents came out of USPTO’s rubber stamp factory, that’s not particularly surprising. Everybody has a favorite stupid patent that blocks innovation. Ours is US Patent 6,907,315, Amazon’s one-click buy button, issued in June 2005.
In addition to our favorite, the Electronic Frontier’s Patent Busting Project lists patents for online shopping carts, the hyperlink, video streaming, internationalizing domain names, pop-ups, targeted banner ads, online credit card payments, browser frames and affiliate links as profoundly harmful to the public.
All of those patents seem to violate the not obvious rule, as the National Academy of Science (NAS) described it in A Patent System for the 21st Century:
The system should reward only inventions that meet statutory tests of novelty and utility, and that are not obvious to contemporaries skilled in the relevant technology.
Instead of thoroughly acquainting itself with ways to avoid granting patents for obvious ideas, USPTO is hard at work lobbying for less re-examination and higher fees. Opponents believe these moves will make it harder for small inventors to vigorously defend their hard-earned patents against abusive corporate megaliths out to profit from the insight and labor of others.
Who’s right? For starters, NAS. The old three-dimensional, “show me your model” system seemed to work more-or-less OK, but USPTO lost the handle when it started refereeing methods and processes.
Anyway, here are the remaining NTP patents USPTO accepted, then rejected, leaving RIM several million dollars poorer, and the rest of us scratching our heads.
- Electronic mail system with RF communications to mobile processors and method of operation thereof: A system for transmitting originated information from one of a plurality of originating processors in an electronic mail system to at least one of a plurality of destination processors in the electronic mail system in accordance with the invention includes a RF information transmission network for transmitting the originated information to at least one RF receiver which transfers the originated information to the at least one of the plurality of destination processors, at least one interface switch, one of the at least one interface switch connecting the electronic mail system to the RF transmission network and transmitting originated information received from the electronic mail system to the RF information transmission network. The originated information is transmitted to a receiving interface switch by the electronic mail system in response to an address of the receiving interface switch and the originated information is transmitted from the receiving interface switch to the RF information transmission network with an address of the destination processor to receive the information. The electronic mail system transmits other originated information within the electronic mail system through a telephone network. US Patent 5,436,960; July 1995.
- Electronic mail system with RF communications to mobile processors: A system (100) for transmitting information from one of a plurality of originating processors A-N to at least a plurality of destination processors (A-N) which may be transported during operation in accordance with the invention includes at least one gateway switch (14), a gateway switch storing information received from one of the at least one originating processor prior to transmission of the information to the at least one destination processor; a RF information transmission network (302) for transmitting stored information received from one of the at least one gateway switch by RF transmission to at least one destination processor; at least one interface switch (304), an interface switch connecting a gateway switch to the RF transmission network and transmitting stored information received from one of the at least one gateway switch to the RF information transmission network; and wherein the information is transmitted to a receiving interface switch by the electronic mail system in response to an address of the receiving interface switch which has been added to the information originated by the originating processor by either the originating processor or gateway switch and the information is transmitted from the receiving interface switch to the RF information transmission network with an address of the destination processor to receive the information which has been added by either the originating processor, a gateway switch or the receiving interface switch. US Patent 5,625,670; April 1997.
- Electronic mail system with RF communications to mobile radios: A system (100) for transmitting information from one of a plurality of originating processors A-N to at least a plurality of destination processors (A-N) which may be transported during operation in accordance with the invention includes at least one gateway switch (14), a gateway switch storing information received from one of the at least one originating processor prior to transmission of the information to the at least one destination processor; a RF information transmission network (302) for transmitting stored information received from one of the at least one gateway switch by RF transmission to at least one destination processor; at least one interface switch (304), an interface switch connecting a gateway switch to the RF transmission network and transmitting stored information received from one of the at least one gateway switch to the RF information transmission network; and wherein the information is transmitted to a receiving interface switch by the electronic mail system in response to an address of the receiving interface switch which has been added to the information originated by the originating processor by either the originating processor or gateway switch and the information is transmitted from the receiving interface switch to the RF information transmission network with an address of the destination processor to receive the information which has been added by either the originating processor, a gateway switch or the receiving interface switch. US Patent 6,067,451; May 2000.
- Electronic mail system with RF communications to mobile processors: A system (100) for transmitting information from one of a plurality of originating processors A-N to at least a plurality of destination processors (A-N) which may be transported during operation in accordance with the invention includes at least one gateway switch (14), a gateway switch storing information received from one of the at least one originating processor prior to transmission of the information to the at least one destination processor; a RF information transmission network (302) for transmitting stored information received from one of the at least one gateway switch by RF transmission to at least one destination processor; at least one interface switch (304), an interface switch connecting a gateway switch to the RF transmission network and transmitting stored information received from one of the at least one gateway switch to the RF information transmission network; and wherein the information is electronic mail system in response to an address of the receiving interface switch which has been added to the information originated by the originating processor by either the originating processor or gateway switch and the information is transmitted from the receiving interface switch to the RF information transmission network with an address of the destination processor to receive the information which has been added by either the originating processor, a gateway switch or the receiving interface switch. US Patent 6,317,592; November 2001.
Put yourself in a patent officer’s shoes. If these applications landed on your desk, would you grant them patents?
Email Battles Backgrounder:
7 comments
Comments feed for this article
March 7th, 2006 at 8:09 pm
michael
I would expect these to be thrown out since 1988. I have seen Messages sent to mobile RF Devices using Routers, Switches and Other devices.. Think back to Australia and the Taxi industry, and the Courier systems.. They have been using exactly that sort of technology the entire time.. It was not EMail. But electronic Messages which we sent to the devices either to all or a single device..
THe only reason it did not send email then is because at that time it was not connected to the internet.
March 7th, 2006 at 8:36 pm
Robert Weiler
Given that Aloha Net was one of the precurors of the Internet and was developed in the early 1970s, there is no way I would grant any of these patents. NTP basically has patents for sending email over AlohaNet. This is non-obvious and original in 1995? I think not.
March 7th, 2006 at 10:01 pm
ron
amateur radio operator have been using rf to send messages for years before the patent was applied for
March 7th, 2006 at 11:03 pm
Moopst
I see nothing innovative here. Maybe a protocol for digitally signing the messages or to verify receipt would be nice but these are all gobeldy-gook.
I’m amazed and worried that a judge would even consider an injunction based on these.
March 8th, 2006 at 5:18 am
jatm
As far as I can see, if you have a .forward file on your unix box and forward your mail to a machine that is on a W-LAN, you are violating those patents.
March 8th, 2006 at 8:09 am
Paul
I had always heard that you couldn’t patent an idea. It could be argued that software is more idea than product, or more like a book or music. Maybe the Patent Office should get out of this arena and let the copyright police handle it.
March 10th, 2006 at 12:36 pm
slashdoter
slashdot: This just in!
In a recent press release, SCO has claimed that Linux, Windows, and, yes, even Nature herself are violating its IP. “Our pattern recognition experts, after verifying our Linux ownership, found that Windows is basically Linux sans fork(2), so we clearly own it too,” says Darl McBride, SCO’s CEO and intellectual property rights advocate. “But the real breakthrough was when we found crabs were finding shells with algorithms that we own.”
“It turns out that when crabs outgrow their shell, they look in (’iterate through,’ in programmer’s lingo) a pile (’array’) of shells, and when they find one that fits, they move in,” explains Yahkee group analyst and industry visionary Laura DiDio. “Although Nature’s algorithm is implemented as a neural net, it has been copied line by line from SCO’s malloc code. It’s time people realized that while a free, massively parallel, evolving population looks good on paper, it needs to face the reality, which is that SCO will enforce it’s rights.”
Open source advocates point out that crabs had perfected their algorithm long before SCO existed, but McBride says he owns the rights, because of an ammendment letter God sent him that nobody can find. He also says that although Caldera released the crab algorithm under the old BSD license, crabs do not include the copyright notice, and besides, SCO has “absolutely no idea what it’s doing.”
http://science.slashdot.org/science/03/08/20/234249.shtml?tid=134&tid=191