Pre-rant: Here’s a timely link from WAMU radio. Guests are programmer-scholar Ben Klemens and Business Software Alliance counselor Emery Simon. Klemens points out how increasingly perilous it is to write a line of code, with all the trolls lurking around, waiting to sue you for every penny of your worth.
Rant: I live in Alexandria, Virginia, just a few miles from the belly of the patent beast, and I’m not just grumpy about the USPTO for increasing traffic on Duke Street. I intensely dislike the U.S. patent system, a ‘tude obviously reinforced by the outcome of the Blackberry case.
Enjoy the above photo of USPTO headquarters. Your tax money financed all this, and even if you’re outside the States, you’ve paid in other ways–through the misery that the U.S. influence on patent law has inflicted on the rest of the planet.
One nice bright spot exists in today’s patent system, however, beyond the nice boats that the system has enabled a patent-lawyer relative of mine to buy. And that is the inconvenience that the Blackberry verdict might impose on certain members of the American elite who favor a Draconian approach toward “protection” of patents and copyrights. Some would consider this to be a most lyrical form of poetic justice. Look, I agree with the lawyers who say innovators must be rewarded. In fact, that’s the problem with the Blackberry case, where patent trolls have prevailed over true creators of wealth. From CNN:
NTP was founded in 1991 by the late inventor Thomas Campana and his patent attorney, Donald Stout, of Arlington, Va. It has no employees and makes no products. Its main assets, Campana’s patents, have spent most of the past decade in Stout’s file drawer. But in 2002 a federal jury found that RIM had infringed five NTP patents that relate to integrating e-mail systems with wireless networks. An appellate court largely agreed in August 2005, and in late October the U.S. Supreme Court declined to issue a stay while it ponders whether to hear the case.
No one has claimed that RIM ever copied NTP’s patents. But under the law — and this isn’t even the controversial part — that doesn’t matter. As long as NTP staked its claim first, if RIM later independently wandered into the same intellectual territory and managed, unlike NTP, to invent and produce a wildly popular product, it is an infringer.
Here’s the controversial part: Should plaintiffs in NTP’s position be entitled not merely to a reasonable royalty but also to an injunction shutting down the infringer? To elevate an already troubling situation to a surreal one, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office began reexamining NTP’s patents in 2003 and as of September 2005 had preliminarily invalidated all 1,921 claims in the eight pertinent NTP patents, including all those that form the basis for NTP’s suit.
Where Clinton wanted the dirty work done: Among the many shameful acts of the Clinton Administration in the IP area was the effort to usurp the copyright-related activities of the Library of Congress and send at least some of them to the USPO. Significantly, Bruce Lehman of the USPTO acted as Clinton’s czar on net.copyright p0licy, not just patent and trademark matters.
Detail: Supposedly government workers will be exempt from the possible injunction. Including congress members? Oh, how I hope not!
Related: Life after the CrackBerry, from Colin at MobileRead. Excerpt: “While the Palm Treo 700w doesn’t deliver true ‘push’ e-mail yet in the sense where the server notifies the device upon incoming e-mails, it offers all the other bells and whistles, such as a comprehensive productivity suite, direct access to Microsoft Exchange Server, one-handed context operations, and fast EVDO for high-speed data transfers.”
