The big news on Friday was the long-overdue settlement between RIM and NTP. RIM paid $612.5M, including $450M already in escrow, to settle all infringement claims and for a perpetual license going forward.
Dennis Crouch says the war is over and posts an relevant reader comment.
Actually, I’m rather sorry to see this settlement. All the media hype and nonsense, plus the fears of politicians of losing their service, seemed to be greatly contributing to patent reform momentum and to the Supreme Court taking more patent cases.
But at least the belated but initially effective RIM reexaminations of the patents in suit served to publicly demonstrate reexamination effectiveness in lowering settlement expectations. And without all the lawsuit publicity the reportedly cited obscure prior art Norwegian university publications would probably never have surfaced.
Like most of you, I've said many times that there was virtually no chance of a shutdown. There are generally two remedies that interest NTP here: an injunction to stop the infringement and damages for past infringement.
The injunction clearly wasn't in either of their interests. An injunction would have a great impact on RIM, even potentially putting them out of business. However, NTP is not exploiting the patent now and they want to leverage RIM's market dominance. They can't really recover under lost sales because they're not making sales. They can play spoiler to prevent RIM from making money, but it doesn't buy them anything.
What they really want is RIM to compensate them for use of the patent, yet RIM has made it clear that they have a workaround and don't intend on paying that license fee. NTP needs the teeth of an injunction to force RIM to negotiate.
It seems like a classic negotiation exercise...
Also, see the WSJ op-ed on the state of the patent system. (Patently Absurd, subscription req'd). Matt on Promote The Progress says it's just another game of blame the lawyers and Dennis wonders if they even understand patent law.
Stephen Nipper offers this choice quote: “It is much easier to suggest solutions when you don't know too much about the problem.” - Malcolm Forbes