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March 9, 2006
Things wot I ought to have blogged
* Many thanks to Mark for wishing me a very happy International Women's Day yesterday. It was fabulous to be made to feel special. Thanks Mark - you rock.
* The O'Reilly E-Tech Conference is in full swing in California, and blog entries on the papers being presented are popping up every hour. Eventually I suspect these presentations will be available as downloadable presentations on ITConversations.com, but in the meantime even the blog entries are fascinating.
* The case surrounding the Blackberry dispute between the Canadian firm Research In Motion (RIM), the makers of the personal digital communications device, and patent holders, NTP, has now been settled, allowing the device to continue to be sold in the US. This is a fascinating case in terms of patent law, and market share. The moral at the end of the story is that if you have enough market share, you can even buy out the original owners of the patent. Although I'm not entirely sure the acts which led to the dispute are entirely moral.
* A couple of Google related stories. Techcrunch have exclusive images of the new Google Calendar service, which looks remarkably like Outlook Calendar but probably crashes less often. And Greg Linden's review of the Google Analyst day presentation is rather noteworthy for the omissions it highlights than the inclusions.
* The Ideas Festival is now less than 3 weeks away. BOOK NOW! TICKETS ARE GOING FAST!!!!!
Posted by jj at March 9, 2006 6:25 PM
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Bah!
The problem with US patents is that no effort is made by the government to ensure that the patent is not a trivial, obvious idea.
Companies like NTP, with no assets other than a portfolio of these dubious patents, make their money by sitting quietly on the patents for a few years, then when a successful business unknowingly infringes on the patent, they swoop in and demand "licensing fees" which, while they might be a lot of money, somehow always turn out to be cheaper than it would be to prove the patent invalid in court.
RIM settled because they saw that potential customers were getting nervous because of the very existence of their ongoing court fight with NTP. There's no real admission of wrongdoing here: it's simply the case that throwing millions of dollars at the troublemakers is expected to be cheaper for RIM than losing sales due to customer uncertainty.
It's also important to note that RIM didn't "steal" anything from NTP. The patent system is supposed to offer a limited-term monopoly on an invention. As it is administered in the US, it's effectively a monopoly on any idea you can use in a business (even if you don't know have the capability to turn that idea into a functional product). There would have been no way for RIM to know that they had conceived the same idea while designing their product until they were contacted by NTP's lawyers.
As someone working in IT, I had really hoped that RIM would succeed in court. It's not inconceivable that every single project I've ever worked on would have done something that sounds vaguely like what one of these dubious patents describes, and it is literally impossible for me to avoid it.
Posted by: Adam Fitzpatrick at March 9, 2006 11:19 PM
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