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"Patent Trolls" attacked by Canadian supporters of Blackberry maker. Microsoft next?

Two lawsuits in two days means that the serious threat that RIM's Blackberry fleet would be sunk by patent action, has been averted. Canadians, however, are incensed at what they see as pernicious American patent laws attacking a Canadian based company.

In a remarkable attack on "patent trolls" Toronto Star writer  Tim Harper described American patent lawyers as "the weak who slay the mighty. Critics call them extortionists."

Harper explained: "Legislators and lobbyists for the high-tech industry here [in Washington] define the patent troll as an individual or company holding a patent without any designs on marketing an idea. Instead they wait for another company to shed the sweat and take the risk, then jump out and claim patent infringement. In some cases, they buy up weak but still valid patents at bargain-basement prices and parlay them into a windfall. Sometimes they stumble upon something after flooding patent offices with applications."

And, he added: "They usually win."

In the RIM case, two decisions have gone the way of the patent holders, with the courts siding wih the Blackberry. As one report put it, "InPro, a Luxembourg patent holding company, has had its claims that RIM had violated its own patents thrown out."

The report said: "If InPro had been successful, it was possible that all the Blackberry users in the UK would have had their machines shut down. Court documents show that there were 375,000 last summer and this number is likely to have increased substantially since then."

But the American decision is less clearcut, and the reprieve may be only temporary. The Globe and Mail's Roma Licuw described the future as crucial: "A real milestone in the U.S. patent battle will take place on Feb. 24, when U.S. District Court Judge James Spencer in Richmond, Virginia will decide if Blackberry sales and service should be shut down in the U.S. because of earlier rulings that determined it had infringed on patents held by U.S. patent holding company NTP Inc."

The question that can't be answered until the crunch comes, is "Will the patent troll really risk destroying the product?" Some observers think not; they think a deal will be struck. The alternative would be an injunction that freezes all Blackberries.

That would kill the goose, poison the well, and cut off the nose to spite the face. Blackberry has a lead in the market, but there are other lawsuits pending in this area. Microsoft versus Visto, for example, is yet to be decided. There are dozens of other email solutions like for example, Memova from Critical Path, which looks to take email into the consumer arena, as well as corporate push email.

The future is dark for push email. Blackberry has made money from it, but no mobile operator has done well out of it yet; and the days when it could command a premium rate for network charges are ending. If the patent case takes more than a year to resolve, the patents would probably end up being worthless.

 Tags: Blackberry, push email, patent troll, Visto