RIM Patent Infringement Ruling Scaled Back

by Glen Shapiro, LawAndTax-News.com, New York

04 August 2005

Ruling on Tuesday, Washington's federal circuit court scaled back a ruling delivered in December in a patent dispute between Research in Motion and NTP Inc.

Late last year, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit supported claims made by NTP that RIM's BlackBerry wireless e-mail devices infringed on its patented e-mail 'push' technology. The appeals court ruling supported the verdict delivered by a lower court, which also felt that the function in BlackBerry devices which automatically receives and displays new e-mail messages without any prompting from the end user represented an infringement of NTP's intellectual property.

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled against RIM in 11 of the 16 claims made by NTP, but vacated an injunction imposed by the lower court against selling the BlackBerry devices in the United States, remanding the case to the district court for further proceedings.

In the decision delivered this week, the Washington court overturned the lower court decision which stated that RIM had infringed on "method" patents owned by NTP, but reaffirmed that the latter firm's "system" patents had been infringed.

Earlier this year, a settlement agreement was reached by the two firms, but the deal subsequently collapsed in June.

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