Apple and Other Tech Companies Face Lawsuit Over Wireless Email Patents

[MacRumors]

Noted patent holding firm NTP today announced that it has sued Apple, Google, Microsoft, and several other technology companies for infringement of its patents related to wireless delivery of email.

NTP Incorporated, the company founded by Tom Campana, the inventor of wireless email, yesterday filed lawsuits against Apple, Inc., Google Inc., HTC Corp., LG Electronics Inc., Microsoft Corporation, and Motorola, Inc. in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia for infringing NTP's eight patents related to the delivery of electronic mail over wireless communications systems. Each of the defendants is a manufacturer or developer of either wireless handheld devices or software applications used in the delivery of email across wireless communications systems.

Donald E. Stout, NTP's co-founder, said, "Use of NTP's intellectual property without a license is just plain unfair to NTP and its licensees. Unfortunately, litigation is our only means of ensuring the inventor of the fundamental technology on which wireless email is based, Tom Campana, and NTP shareholders are recognized, and are fairly and reasonably compensated for their innovative work and investment. We took the necessary action to protect our intellectual property."

NTP famously faced off against Research in Motion (RIM) over this same intellectual property, reaching a 2006 settlement in which RIM agreed to pay $612.5 million. Emboldened by its success against RIM and an upholding of many of its patent claims in a review by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, NTP has now decided to take on Apple and other major players over what has become a ubiquitous technological feature for a host of wireless handheld devices.

NTP's business is solely focused on management of its portfolio of over 50 patents primarily related to wireless email delivery, and the company has been criticized as being a "patent troll" for its very aggressive enforcement of its patent rights while having no intention of pursuing the technology itself. The company also has a number of lawsuits still outstanding, one targeting Palm and another group targeting the major U.S. wireless providers: Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile.

Article Link: Apple and Other Tech Companies Face Lawsuit Over Wireless Email Patents

 

[millerb7]

Good for NTP.

They own em, they should get paid... end of story. Patent troll or not.

 

[fishmoose]

Hopefully Apple wont settle and instead tries to fight these patent trolls. This is ridiculous.

 

[HiVolt]

So stupid. Patent trolls like this needs to die. Patent reform please. If you have a patent, either make a product or service incorporating the technology in 5 years or go pound sand.

 

[Durendal]

Good for NTP.

They own em, they should get paid... end of story. Patent troll or not.

And this is why the patent system needs to either get some really serious reform or be abolished all together. Wireless email? REALLY? Like that's not a broad and obvious patent.

The system has been abused to the point where we need to get rid of it completely.

 

[Full of Win]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B367 Safari/531.21.10)

...and people wonder about the difference in how much an iPhone build cost and how much they charge to consumers.

 

[Xavier]

Good lord...

If NTP had their way, no one would have wireless email

 

[alent1234]

So stupid. Patent trolls like this needs to die. Patent reform please. If you have a patent, either make a product or service incorporating the technology in 5 years or go pound sand.

NTP presented their tech to AT&T in the 1990's and were told there was no interest. RIM had commercial success. far from a patent troll.

i looked it up and the patent has some good technical info unlike the usual pencil drawings of patent trolls

 

[nwcs]

Maybe the patent attorneys who have posted here before can respond but I wonder what happens when a patented idea goes generic or ubiquitous?

 

[Jurwin]

Pay up apple! I'm tired of you stealing other peoples technology.

 

[sockdoggy]

Funny how NTP didn't invent or contribute to any aspect of that patent... ie 'wireless' and 'email.'

 

[cere]

Good for NTP.

They own em, they should get paid... end of story. Patent troll or not.

But they shouldn't own them. But for a really clueless, emotional decision on the part of a judge, NTPs claims against RIM would have been thrown out as NTPs patents are clearly covered by prior art and therefore invalid.

Google: RIM, NTP TekNow.

Hopefully, Apple, Google and MS bring the TekNow guys in to the courtroom and a competent judge lets them demonstrate the software that predates NTPs patents by many years. If so, NTP loses the case immediately.

 

[cmaier]

Here we to again. Another thread full of complaints about the patent system from folks who neither understand the patent system nor have even looked at the patents in this case.

This will be followed by people claiming the patent is invalid on the basis of the abstract (instead of the claims) because some open source project did what the abstract says two years after the patent's priority date.

Then a bunch of folks will complain that the first bunch of folks are fanboys, and if Apple was suing they'd change their tune.

Can we fast-forward past all that stuff?

 

[Lord Vader]

Pay up apple! I'm tired of you stealing other peoples technology.

So Google, Microsoft and others stole too? Back to the cage, troll.

 

[cere]

NTP presented their tech to AT&T in the 1990's and were told there was no interest. RIM had commercial success. far from a patent troll.

i looked it up and the patent has some good technical info unlike the usual pencil drawings of patent trolls

Too bad there was prior art from the 1980s that predated NTPs patents.

They are by definition a patent troll. The 'inventor' is dead. NTP is purely a patent holding company, owned, staffed and run by lawyers. They produce nothing. Their entire business model is about holding patents and suing. That is the definition of patent troll.

 

[JAQ]

"...the inventor of wireless email..."

As the inventor of wireless ********, I order NTP to stop disseminating their claims over wireless networks.

Patents are not "property" that someone has a gods-given right to exploit. They are monopolies on (in some cases) abstract ideas, granted by overworked and underqualified government clerks. When one of those patent clerks screws up and grants an overly broad and obvious patent, it should be invalidated, not rewarded. People who make their living doing nothing but licensing patents (i.e. not developing them, not making anything) serve no value to industry or society.

 

[Lord Vader]

Here we to again. Another thread full of complaints about the patent system from folks who neither understand the patent system nor have even looked at the patents in this case.

This will be followed by people claiming the patent is invalid on the basis of the abstract (instead of the claims) because some open source project did what the abstract says two years after the patent's priority date.

Then a bunch of folks will complain that the first bunch of folks are fanboys, and if Apple was suing they'd change their tune.

Can we fast-forward past all that stuff?

You can sing the same song as you won't it doesn't change the fact that such patent is not even possible. How do you patent an obvious thing?

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

Maybe the patent attorneys who have posted here before can respond but I wonder what happens when a patented idea goes generic or ubiquitous?

That was what the investigations by the Patent and Trademark office were all about. All they have to find is one use of the patented technology before the NTP patent was issued and NTP doesn't have a leg to stand on. Their claims evaporate into nothingness and they would end up owing 612.5M + interest to RIM...

THAT would be delicious and would hopefully make it harder for patent trolls to, in the words of Dire Straits: 'Get your money for nothing'...

The true cost of patent trolls *could* bring down the internet and the computer industry, if the right patent could be found and the shell corporation owning it pushes it hard enough.

 

[Kar98]

...in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia...

Not Texas? Well, that's progress

 

[alent1234]

You can sing the same song as you won't it doesn't change the fact that such patent is not even possible. How do you patent an obvious thing?

wireless email wasn't obvious in 1990

 

[BornAgainMac]

I wish I patented the "Patent Troll" patent. I have no problem with patents but not for something like breathing. Seriously.

 

[oahazmatt]

Good for NTP.

They own em, they should get paid... end of story. Patent troll or not.

A patent should be about how, not what. If they hold a patent for something as vague as "receiving wireless e-mail", that's too vague and should never have been approved. However, if they hold a patent for "delivery {x} to {y} using {z1}, {z2} and {z3}" and these companies are indeed infringing on that method, then yes, they deserve to win.

 

[cmaier]

You can sing the same song as you won't it doesn't change the fact that such patent is not even possible. How do you patent an obvious thing?

You don't even know what "obvious thing" was patented. You haven't read the patent's claims. You are reacting to a blog's description of the patent based on it's abstract, which is of no legal relevance.

 

[cmaier]

...in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia...

Not Texas? Well, that's progress

EDVA is a very common patent court - it's called the "rocket docket" because the whole case takes less than 2 years.

 

[cere]

Here we to again. Another thread full of complaints about the patent system from folks who neither understand the patent system nor have even looked at the patents in this case.

This will be followed by people claiming the patent is invalid on the basis of the abstract (instead of the claims) because some open source project did what the abstract says two years after the patent's priority date.

Then a bunch of folks will complain that the first bunch of folks are fanboys, and if Apple was suing they'd change their tune.

Can we fast-forward past all that stuff?

WTF are you talking about? Their patents were invalid because a commercial enterprise produced and sold software that did what their patents covered years before them. That is prior art. That makes their patent invalid. RIM got unlucky with the judge in their trial. NTP had this thrown out only because the they convinced the judge that a 'last modified' date on some licensing files in the TekNow folders meant the software had been tampered with in the courtroom demo, convinced the judge this meant RIM was deceiving the court and the judge threw it out. A competent judge will not allow NTP's foolishness to happen again.

TekNow predates anything from NTP by years.