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.Read the rest here.
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.
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"All the affairs of men should be managed by individuals or voluntary associations, and . . . the State should be abolished." —Benjamin Tucker
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"Fat chance." —Sheldon Richman
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:
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'
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