Blackberry Patent Dispute
Bus 415
May 21, 2006
Many businesses are faced with legal issues that can negatively affect their operations. Patent infringement lawsuits are reoccurring and appear to be a common legal issue among the technology industry. For the purpose of this paper I will discuss a patent legal dispute as it pertains to a recently settled lawsuit between Blackberry's manufacture, Research In Motion (RIM) and NTP, a small patent holding company. In addition, this paper will also discuss the court process and structure as well as the NTP and RIM legal dispute resolution.
In law, intellectual property (IP) is an umbrella term for various legal entitlements which attach to certain types of information, ideas, or other intangibles in their expressed form. The holder of this legal entitlement is generally entitled to exercise various exclusive rights in relation to the subject matter of the IP (http://en.wikepedia.org).
Patents, trademarks and designs fall into a particular subset of intellectual property known as industrial property (http://en.wikepedia.org).
Patent disputes have increased with the growth of the Technology industry. According to Mohammed, the Blackberry dispute is the latest in a string of patent disputes that have cast a shadow over corporate technology users (Mohammed, 2006). In order to understand the validity of such a dispute one must first understand patents and patent infringement:
A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state to a person for a fixed period of time in exchange for the regulated, public disclosure of certain details of a device, method, process or composition of matter (substance) (known as an invention) which is new, inventive, and useful or industrially ap ...