Canada's Research In Motion (RIM), maker of the BlackBerry
wireless email device, settled with US firm NTP in March, though it
did not concede that it had infringed NTP's patents.
RIM said that it paid NTP $612.5 million because it was losing
business as customers backed off from the threat of a court-ordered
suspension of RIM services. NTP now alleges that Palm is infringing
its wireless email patents.
NTP is a patent holding company which exists to manage 50
patents. Seven patents are involved in the dispute with Palm, five
of which were part of the case against RIM.
The current complaint alleges that Palm systems which integrate
email into their services, such as the Treo, Palm VII, and Tungsten
handhelds and smart phones, violate several of NTP's patents.
Palm's new smartphones allow users to read and send emails and
browse the internet.
"We have attempted – on numerous occasions – to resolve this
issue with Palm without resorting to litigation that is both
time-consuming and costly," said Donald Stout, co-founder of NTP,
in a statement. "Despite our efforts, Palm has chosen to continue
to unlawfully infringe on our patents. Though we would still prefer
to resolve this issue with Palm in a negotiated license agreement
that is fair and reasonable to both parties, we are filing action
today as a last resort to protect our valuable intellectual
property."
The suit was filed in the US District Court for the Eastern
District of Virginia on Monday. It asks the court to stop Palm
"continuing to infringe on NTP's patents". It asks for monetary
damages for the alleged infringements of the past.
NTP claims to have first contacted Palm in 2000, when it wrote
to the company's then-parent company 3Com. The company's complaint
says that it wrote to the firm on two further occasions regarding
the issue.
Palm hit back today. In a company statement, it noted that all
seven of the patents asserted by NTP "are being re-examined by the
US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) and have been rejected by the
re-examiners as invalid." Palm also said that "the NTP patents
disclose a pager-based email service that has nothing in common
with the mobile-computing devices invented by Palm."
The company admitted being "in occasional contact with NTP
concerning a license to these patents."
The company added: "When Palm last communicated with NTP many
months ago, however, each of the patents already was the subject of
re-examination proceedings by the PTO. Palm is disappointed that,
after many months of silence and repeated rejections of NTP’s
claims by the PTO, NTP has chosen to sue on patents of doubtful
validity."
It concluded: "Palm respects legitimate intellectual property
rights, but will defend itself vigorously against the attempted
misuse of the patent and judicial systems to extract monetary value
for rights to patents that may ultimately have no value at
all."
