BlackBerry Battle Could Reverberate
The latest in the patent battle between BlackBerry makers RIM and NTP is that NTP is accusing RIM of lobbying the Patent Office’s head to ask for a re-evaluation of their patents. It’s apparently extremely rare for patent re-examinations to be ordered by the director. The fact that this one comes just after the director was found sporting a new BlackBerry device makes it seem all the more questionable. Of course, that doesn’t mean the patents are valid, either. No matter what, I would expect this battle to get even more tangled up before it gets worked out, so I doubt anyone is going to force the BlackBerry network offline for legal reasons any time soon (though, unexplained outages due to technical problems may show up at times…).
