RIM Let Off Patent Hook (In Germany)
Germany’s federal patent court has ruled in favor of Research In Motion in a suit brought by a Luxembourg-based company for patent infringement. The court invalidated the patents held by InPro, which has sued RIM and other companies in other European countries over patents covering PDAs with thumbwheels and a proxy-server system. Given all the patent lawsuits flying around RIM, other companies in the mobile email space suing even more other companies, and even RIM’s history of aggressively protecting its patents, isn’t it becoming clear that if so many things to do with mobile email were so obvious that so many different people could independently come up with them that maybe the patents shouldn’t have been granted in the first place?
