Apparently taking on Research in Motion (RIM) wasn’t enough. Patent shell holding company NTP has now filed a patent infringement claim against Palm. Given the $600+ million settlement with RIM, this new suit isn’t a big surprise.
Palm points to the fact that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has either rejected or is still re-examining all seven of the patents that NTP claims Palm has infringed. Palm also noted that the NTP patents disclose a pager-based email service that has little in common with the mobile-computing devices invented by Palm.
However, it’s still not clear why RIM chose to pay up after months of legal wrangling and appearances that it had a strong case. Was it simply an insurance policy to end the uncertainty that was affecting its business? Or is the payment a smoking gun that indicates some validity in NTP’s patents? We shall see.
… Richi Jennings and David Sengupta