Every BlackBerry users favorite Patent holding company, NTP, is back at it again. This time, however, they aren’t going after Research in Motion. They are going after RIM’s arch nemeses Palm.
NTP has filed a lawsuit alleging that Palm’s Treo infringes on patents that they hold. If you remember Research in Motion paid a settlement of $612.5 million at the end of it’s legal battle with NTP that went on for years. NTP may actually have a tougher road to go as the U.S. Supreme Court has put restrictions in place that prevents an injunction, the $612.5 million thorn in RIM’s side, from be used to force a company to settle out of court before the infringing company exhausts all of it’s appeals.
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Of course…we shouldn’t have expected NTP to go away.
It’s a basic rule of economics that you get more of a behavior that is rewarded. NTP will keep doing this until they begin to lose and pay a cost for their behavior.
I think that if you violate someone’s patents, you should have to pay up, however, I sure hope the new regulations give the USPTO enough time to ivalidate NTP’s patent claims so that no one else including Palm have to go through what RIM went through…