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Tuesday, March 07, 2006

RIM Was Wronged

My latest op-ed, "RIM Was wronged," is online at The Future of Freedom Foundation website. Here's a sample:
For the last few years we’ve been reading that Research in Motion’s popular mobile-email service, BlackBerry, may be shut down because the company “infringed the patents” of a company called NTP. That’s all the newspapers said.

Curious readers would want to know more. Did black-clad RIM operatives break into NTP’s office safe and steal the idea for mobile email? Did RIM spies tap the phones at NTP? Did RIM gumshoes tail NTP’s engineers and eavesdrop on confidential conversations?

No, nothing like that. “There was never any dispute that Research in Motion Ltd., the Canadian firm that introduced the world to the BlackBerry in 1999, came up with its own technology to power the wireless e-mail device,” the Washington Post writes. But the BlackBerry resembled something already patented by NTP. It doesn’t matter that RIM formulated its similar idea independently. Under the law, that’s enough to get RIM into trouble.
Read the rest here.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The Blackberry is a triumph of marketing over substance. Now there is a real alternative. And one that does online appointment setting through your smart phone, contact management, email and you can work on your MS office documents too. diarypoint is new generation of mobile computing. It really is the 'office in your pocket'