Patent Office rejects another NTP patent

RIM clears another hurdle in its dispute with NTP, as the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issues a non-final rejection of a fifth patent.

The story "Patent Office rejects another NTP patent" published February 1, 2006 at 11:37 AM is no longer available on CNET News.

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[Marcus Westrup]

Friends in high places

I can?t help but think that NTP?s claims will ultimately fail, not because of some lack of merit in the patent claims, but because so many powerful lobbyists and politicians do not want to give up their BlackBerry's.

[SilverStreak1]

Friends in high places

Well since a ruling was made that blackberries would continue to function for all government employees, the 'friends in high places' argument is somewhat a moot point.

This is nothing more than greed going on here. RIM has been in business for years, and now that the popularity of their Blackberry service is exploding - they decide to file a patent claim. uh-huh.

[sanenazok]

Nonfinal Rejections

Breaking News: the PTO always issues non-final rejections. It's how the examiners make money.

[themonkman]

Fine by me

Holding companies, such as NTP, do no more than stifle innovation. They had no prototype for their patent, and probably never had any plans to make one. There are many of these holding companies who think up ideas, pay high prices IP and Patent attorneys to file their ideas, and just sit on them until a company like RIM, who is actually innovating and producing product, infringes on their patent. It's patent ambush tactics, and it's bad for the economy, and bad for technology.

I'd love to see a Patent Reform bill that states if you do not have a workable prototype for your software or hardware product, that you cannot patent it. You can have Patent Pending status, but that should only last for a limited time (3-5 years) which if you don't make a prototype, your patent filing is rejected.

[Cyrus_K]

NTP is a parasite

Patent office finally gets it right.
Glad to see that they have just about rejected NTP's bogus patent claims on having invented what Blackberry actually brought to the market.
IMHO, Patents should only be issued when a product is actually made, and it actually works.
Because as anyone who has created something complex, thus innovative, and patentable knows, it is easy to come up with ideas, hard part is to develop it, debug it and make it actually user friendly and thus into a useful product.

So how in Gods name patent office issues patents to those who have not made anything, but have a write up, is beyon

[chuck_whealton]

NTP needs to go away

I fully agree. Patents are given way too easily to those who haven't done anything except come up with an idea that they have no idea how to impliment.

Chuck

[tostien]

This is NOT news. Will the journalist please talk to a patent lawyer

Will at least one journalist at CNet PLEASE have a 10 minute conversation with a patent lawyer. CNet is writing more and more about patents but is totally off with the stories and it's making CNet look foolish. A non-final rejection means nothing. If you didn't get a non-final rejection, it would mean you wrote the claims of your patent too narrowly to be very useful. It's probably a first Office Action from the patent office and now you read the Examiner's comments, maybe conduct a phone interview, and bargain for the scope of your patent rights. To the other commenter, it has nothing to do with money - they don't get more money for the non-final rejection. You pay for this upfront and they'd take less time and get money quicker (i.e the Issue fee) if they allowed patents right away. Further, even a final rejection isn't necessarily final.

[Tatsnice]

Outcome

Don't know about anyone else, But I sure would like to see the outcome of this one.
I had an opportunity to see these Rim Pagers in action. Was disappointed whe the corporation I work for decided on another communication device which had no legal hassles. Little did they know how much money they would lose by implementing them.