Patent Law

Wireless & Witless

By Gary Odom and Jordan Kuhn

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) and Moto Q maker Motorola sued each other Saturday for patent infringement. Illinois-based Motorola chose Delaware and the Eastern District of Texas, while Ontario-based RIM chose the Northern District of Texas. No venue shopping there.

Motorola asserted seven patents against RIM in one case, and filed a declaratory judgment motion on five RIM patents in the other. Meanwhile, RIM whipped out nine patents to flagellate Motorola with. RIM also whined in its complaint that Motorola was trying to extract excessive royalties, having "manipulated and subverted various standards development processes," to get patents covering the standards, thus setting itself up for patent pillage.

RIM and Motorola had a cross-licensing agreement from 2003 that expired at the end of last year.

The two companies compete in wireless communications and server software; both highly competitive markets. Motorola comes from a voice communications background, while RIM originated with data transfer. The two are encroaching on each other's market base, stirring corporate testosterone.

According to market research firm IDC, RIM's Blackberry commands 45% market share in mobile devices, compared to Motorola's 9% for its Moto Q model; Motorola having lost ground in the past year. Publicly, RIM cried that Motorola was compensating for its "declining fortunes" by trying to rub RIM's nose in patent royalty poop.

Last week, RIM hung its North American customers out to dry for three hours with a service outage for wireless email.

Both parties have indignantly tagged the other's action as meritless, and vowed to fight until the last dog dies. If the parties have a lick of sense, the dispute will never see trial. But corporations regularly resemble colicky crib-dwellers. RIM had its wallet bashed by NTP a couple of years ago in a mulish display of self-defeating infantility, costing the company $612.5 million when it could have had a license for less than $100 million if it had kept its cool.

Full post as published by The Patent Prospector on February 21, 2008 (boomark / email).