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BlackBerry patent battle ends with $612.5 (euro509.6) million settlement
By PETER SVENSSON
AP Technology Writer
The Associated Press
Research In Motion Ltd., the maker of the BlackBerry e-mail device, Friday announced it has settled its long-running patent dispute with a small patent holding firm, averting a possible court-ordered shutdown of the BlackBerry system.
RIM has paid the firm NTP $612.5 million (euro509.6 million) in a "full and final settlement of all claims," the companies said.
At a hearing last week, NTP had asked a federal court in Richmond, Virginia, for an injunction blocking the continued use of key technologies underpinning BlackBerry's wireless e-mail service.
At the hearing, Judge James R. Spencer expressed impatience with RIM and urged a settlement.
"He basically questioned the sanity of RIM, and said it wasn't acting very rationally," said Rod Thompson, patent attorney at Farella, Braun and Martel in San Francisco. "His prodding of the parties worked."
The settlement is on the low end of expectations, Thompson said, especially since RIM will not have to pay any future royalties. There had also been talk of NTP receiving a stake in RIM.
RIM, which is based in Waterloo, Ontario, had already put away $450 million (euro374 million) in escrow, the amount of a settlement in 2004 that later fell apart. RIM will record the additional $162.5 million (euro135.2 million) in its fourth-quarter results, it said.
NTP, based in Arlington, Virginia, sued in 2001, and a year later, a federal jury agreed that RIM had infringed on the smaller firm's patents.
The settlement ends a period of anxiety for many of the more than 3 million BlackBerry users in the United States. Uncertainty over the outcome had some customers wondering whether they would experiences brief outages or even a shutdown.
RIM had assured users it had developed new software to work around NTP's patents. But because few details were released, analysts and some corporations expressed concerns about the viability of the technology and the legal ramifications of adopting it.
With a settlement, RIM will be able to avoid any of the headaches associated with introducing this new technology. Even if the software worked, it, too, might have been challenged by NTP, introducing yet another twist to this complicated and long-running case.
In arguing against an injunction, RIM's attorneys had stressed the public interest in keeping its service running. Government and emergency employees would be exempt from the BlackBerry ban, but sorting them from other users would prove difficult and problematic.
RIM attorneys also noted that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, in a proceeding parallel to the Virginia case, was poised to finally reject all patents at the heart of the case.
Spencer first issued an injunction in 2003 but held off on its enforcement during RIM's appeals. After those efforts largely failed, the case returned to Spencer.
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