Excellent article in this week's Economist -- The Real Lesson of Blackberry. An excerpt:
RIM is generally regarded as the victim of an injustice. Founded 21 years ago by two engineering students who still help run it, the company is being held for ransom by a “patent troll”. The monster emerging from under the bridge is an entity called NTP, which doesn't actually make or sell anything—it doesn't even have a website, for goodness sake. But it has hired a handful of lawyers to enforce its patents and in settlement talks this week, it was demanding almost 6% of RIM's sales in America until 2012 when its patents expire—about $1 billion. NTP's threat of a legal injunction to shut down BlackBerry unless it pays up is viewed as little short of extortion.
The easy conclusion is that the patent system is being cynically used to wreck the livelihoods of honest folks who are the true innovators. That's wrong. The chief lesson of the BlackBerry saga is that patents are there to be protected. If the system is to have any meaning, its integrity must be upheld for the sake of the businesses that rely on it and the public that benefits from innovation.
The article goes on to point out that RIM had plenty of inexpensive opportunities to settle when NTP first brought the suit in 2000, and again when they lost convincingly to NTP in court in 2002.
The article acknowledges that the US patent system has its flaws, but concludes with this sharply-made point:
Distressed BlackBerry users argue that too many of the world's workers rely on the device for the service to be shut down. But many of their jobs depend on the principle at stake in this case—that the courts should protect intellectual property because it rewards inventors by conferring a real title to an intangible asset. Business requires confidence that intellectual property will be respected and infringers brought to justice, regardless of whether the litigant is using the patent or not. Only with that security will firms patent and license their inventions, thus allowing others to use their ideas.
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