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February 7, 2006
BlackBerry, Patent Trolls, and molding, rotten meat
Tim Wu has posted an interesting summary of the plight of BlackBerry titled the Weapons of Business Destruction describing 'How a tiny little "patent troll" got BlackBerry in a headlock'.
What would happen if a rogue actor managed to get hold of a powerful patent and threatened to detonate it and destroy e-mail as we know it? You'd have the BlackBerry NTP v. RIM case—the tech world's very own Dr. Strangelove. NTP, a one-man Virginia firm, armed with nothing but patents, currently threatens to bring down BlackBerry and with it the sanity of millions of e-mail addicts. A textbook "patent troll," he wants a billion dollars to stand down. What to do?
It is telling that the dilemmas created by software patents today are routinely compared to those created by nuclear arms, with patent trolls playing the role of the nuclear madman. But while it's easy to bash trolls as evil extortionists, to do so may be to miss an important lesson: Patent trolls aren't evil, but rational and predictable, akin to the mold that eventually grows on rotten meat. They're useful for understanding how the world of software patent got to where it is and what might be done to fix it.
Continue reading Weapons of Business Destruction.
Technorati tags: BlackBerry,RIM,Patent Trolls
Posted by Peenie Wallie on February 7, 2006 at 8:56 AM
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