Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

The article is very long, so here's a shorter version based on quotes:

“In the world of patents, you're not going to get any traction unless you're willing to enforce them,” Mr. Stout explains.
This is true, and also means smaller companies with patents have a very hard time dealing with larger/richer companies.

True to form, RIM's entrepreneurial bosses stood their ground. They regarded NTP as a vile patent “troll” — a company with dormant patents that preys on successful technology companies to extort fees from a hot-selling product.

The company (NTP) was never about making things or selling things. It was about protecting potentially valuable ideas, some of which dealt with sending messages to wireless devices.
This I don't like, so even though RIM made the big blunder of not paying NTP, NTP is also quite questionable.

From the outset, RIM and its lawyers didn't seem to take NTP seriously. The company was convinced NTP's patents were junk because they codified technology that was already widely in use by RIM and countless others. In legal jargon, NTP's patents were “prior art,” and therefore invalid.

It took the jury barely four hours to reach a verdict. They found not only that RIM had infringed on NTP's patents, but that its conduct had been “willful.” The court assessed damages of $23-million (U.S.) and a royalty based on the number of BlackBerrys RIM sold in the United States.

Through arrogance, blunder and bad advice, RIM's potential bill had shot up from a few million dollars before the trial to roughly $20-million when its case headed south at trial, to now hundreds of millions of dollars.

Around the same time, RIM also mounted a major lobbying and public relations push in Washington. It was eager to convince policy makers that it was the victim of patent trolling gone wild and a dysfunctional patent system.

The endgame isn't over. Legal experts still expect RIM will have to cough up hundreds of millions of dollars to end its nightmare. Even with most of NTP's patents in technical disrepute, the U.S. justice system has made them legally valid.
This is odd, and an obvious flaw in the system.

“There are 16 million lines of code in BlackBerry. Sixteen million. It's hard to imagine 16 million lines of code.
Right, but only an extremely small portion of this is in any way dealing with the e-mail technologies that relate to the NTP patents.

I hope that this case will end soon so that a trivial thing like e-mail support in mobile phones can flourish without this kind of melodrama occuring again. Obviously RIM made a big mistake being so arrogant about the whole patenting issue, but this case is now so much more than just two companies fighting about patent licensing.

Globetechnology: Patently absurd