Research In Motion, the maker of the popular BlackBerry, has a reached a settlement with the patent holding company NTP.
In the settlement, Research In Motion (Nasdaq: RIMM) has agreed to pay NTP $613 million for the rights to use the patent. RIMM’s use of the NTP patent for the BlackBerry will run out in 2012.
In after-hours trading, shares of RIMM drastically jumped 20% (+13.68) upwards, closing at 85.60, due to the positive news of the settlement agreement.
For more information, check out RIMM @ Yahoo! Finance.
The funny thing is eventually the US Patent Office is going to invalidate every patent that are part of the this case and because the judges involved in this case wouldn’t allow the Patent Office to complete its re-evaluation NPT is getting money it doesn’t deserve.
RIM was right in attempting to delay the prceedings since it is on the right side of this dispute. NPT is a holding company that didn’t actually create the technology at the heart of this dispute in the first place. They purchased it from the company that actually created the technology.
I think people just have something against a big corporation that stands up for itself and has the funds to fight what it thinks is right.
They should have waited it out for NTP patents to come back as invalid. The only sweet justice is they more than likely made the money they paid out back from the share jump.
Jon and Tyler:
I agree 100% that the patent office would (or should?) invalidate the patents related to the case. I have read a lot of articles and I’ve heard on NPR and BBC Radio that the BlackBerry is extremely popular in Washington D.C. They kept mentioning high usage at Department of Justice in particular. I even heard that if NTP won this case, Congress (I believe) would stipulate members of the government were exempt from the ruling, and could continue to use the BlackBerry.
Off topic, I think the patents granted for software are out of control. Software patents are especially harmful to the further development of better computing systems and a more powerful internet.
-Nick