Patents Rejected for BlackBerry
Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry wireless e-mail device, said yesterday that the United States Patent and Trademark Office had issued preliminary rejections of two wireless e-mail patents owned by NTP, the holding company that had won a patent infringement lawsuit against it.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the payoff to a signal from eleven days earlier, when reporting indicated the U.S. Patent Office was likely to side with the BlackBerry maker in its long-running dispute with NTP. The preliminary rejections now formally confirm that direction: two of the wireless e-mail patents underpinning NTP's case are on track to be struck down.
The stakes come from history — NTP won a patent infringement ruling against Research in Motion back in 2002 and has kept the lawsuit alive since, while separately monetizing its portfolio through deals such as a confirmed license agreement with Visto. The rejections strike at both the courtroom threat hanging over BlackBerry service and the value of the broader licensing strategy.
First-order effects
- RIM gains immediate leverage in the infringement case: with the core patents preliminarily rejected, a court-ordered shutdown of U.S. BlackBerry e-mail service looks far less likely than it did before the Patent Office acted.
- NTP's negotiating position deteriorates directly — its claim against RIM rests on patents the USPTO now says should never have issued, weakening both the damages case and any injunction threat.
Second-order effects
- NTP's licensing business takes the hit alongside the lawsuit: if the patents fail on re-examination, future royalty demands modeled on the Visto-style license become harder to justify, and other vendors facing NTP claims gain reason to resist settling rather than pay.
- RIM's enterprise customers and carrier partners, who had been weighing contingency plans around a possible service disruption, can hold off on migration costs — removing a churn risk that hung over BlackBerry deployments all year.
Third-order effects
- The episode puts the patent re-examination process itself on trial as a check on non-practicing entities: a holding company with no products extracting value from litigation becomes the test case for whether the USPTO can correct its own over-issuance before courts enforce it.
- If the rejections hold through final action, expect wireless messaging patent disputes to shift from courtroom showdowns toward validity challenges first, changing how licensing firms like NTP price their portfolios and how operating companies defend them.
The trend: Patent-office re-examination is emerging as the decisive battleground in wireless-messaging patent fights, letting operating companies like RIM attack a litigant's portfolio directly rather than fight only in court.