The Inside Track on Firefox Development.

February 24, 2006

Bye Bye Blackberry?

I cannot believe people are discussing life without these things. It's like this: I have a patent on television. I don't plan on doing anything with it, but I'm going to shut TV down for all of you, and you're going to sit about and think about life without TV? What's wrong with people?! Is this the world we all want to live in, where people without the interest or capability to pursue technology can hold everyone else captive? That's not the world I want to live in.

Posted by ben at February 24, 2006 10:57 AM

Comments

From what people are saying, this loss might be needed to give the government a long-overdue beating with a clue stick.

Posted by: ant at February 24, 2006 11:22 AM

My theory is that there are too many people with too much power who use these things on a daily business for Blackberry handhelds to disappear.

The day that the service stops is a day on which the world's most powerful people all at once find themselves frustrated about the same thing. In such a vacuum some solution will have to rise over the situation.

Posted by: Grant Hutchins at February 24, 2006 12:31 PM

This is just a bargaining game. Even if NTP keeps the patents, Blackberry will continue on. RIM is just trying to show that in the case that the patents are upheld, it can get along without them. That way they can negotiate a lower licensing fee with NTP...

Not that the whole game isn't the rediculous result of a $%*#$'ed up system that allows software concepts to be monopolized...

Posted by: Adam Sacarny at February 24, 2006 1:28 PM

Adam - yeah, I'm more talking about the folk who are talking about "life without blackberry" - come on, is that something that we should stand for as a society? I guess this applies equally to other areas like loss of civil liberties etc...

Posted by: Ben at February 24, 2006 2:22 PM

Damn right, Ben! It's hackers like you, Ben, and the rest of the Mozilla team who needs to remind the world that we can do things for ourselves too instead of always relying on other people for absolutely everything. Maybe urban people need reminders of what our original hunter-gatherer culture was like.

So the Blackberry is dead? Who cares, let's invent another one!

Posted by: Pseudonymous Coward at February 24, 2006 3:07 PM

"give the government a long-overdue beating with a clue stick."

Maybe. If the judge eventually gives a horrible looking decision (from RIM's perspective), AND the patents that prompted the original court case are all speedily overturned, then maybe RIM will try to involve the Canadian government somehow, possibly with Nafta, with the argument that the court decision restricted its trade in an unfair manner: patents granted in error, which gave advantage to a competitor, and that a court's decision (that the fact that RIM's servers are in Canada doesn't mean that infringement could not take place in the US) was not consistent with law.

I only speculate this because they seem quite stubborn about not settling with NTP. If they settled voluntarily, then it would be harder to turn it into a trade dispute or a political dispute.

This story is already very political in Canada (in terms of press coverage), and it comes in the context of whole slough of other Canada-US business controversies.

Posted by: anon at February 24, 2006 4:52 PM

This isn't about shutting things down.... they just want a ton of cash for this patent.

It's a game of hardball, and nobody is willing to back down.

They bought the claims to the patent, and now they want to cash in on the asset.

This is like an evil game of chicken. I can't blame RIM for not backing down in it's refusal to pay.

IMHO companies that exist purely to enforce patents should be taxed at 99%. That's the only fix. The problem is that this is a very profitable business model (all you need is a business license, a PO Box, some investors and lawyers. No real HR dept, no IT, no research and development, no sales, no marketing. Nothing but lawyers.

Sad really that people abuse the system like that.

IMHO some patents I can see respecting, and by large, most patent holders are pretty fair about it. But some abuse the system, and that's got to stop.

We also need a law that makes it illegal to charge more than the worth of the patent. Also after a certain amount of time, if the patent isn't enforced, you can't just start charging (like in the case of GIF, where they waited until it was well used before striking, knowing that brings in more cash).

Posted by: Robert Accettura at February 24, 2006 4:56 PM

Patents are weapons in a giant 'mexican standoff' of intellelectual property. They need to be done away with.

Posted by: matt Lyon at February 24, 2006 6:53 PM

I still support RMS's idea, that although there are some philosophically ethical cases when software patents could conceivably be justified, the cost of discerning the wheat from the chaff for this moment in time is still to great compared to the negative effects of software patents.

But of course it does kind of remind me of how RMS no longer support the Creative Commons because some (but not all) of the CC licenses make 'unethical restrictions' (RMS's words).

Posted by: Lemi4 aka. fERDI:) at February 25, 2006 9:24 AM

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