BlackBerry at heart of legal conflict
WORTH REPEATING
On the street and on the Internet, BlackBerry addicts are fretting over the future of this mighty totem of the information age. Much more than a few emails are at stake: The legal battle over BlackBerry — which could see the service shut down in America — dramatizes a much larger conflict over the role of intellectual property rights in the modern economy and the power of courts to police innovation. The BlackBerry case is a battle over the intellectual property in a small piece of the technology that makes the device work. NTP, a small patent holding company, has proved in court that Research in Motion (RIM), the Canadian-based BlackBerry maker, infringed its patent on that bit of technology. That means NTP can get an automatic court injunction that could halt BlackBerry service. Faced with such a threat, RIM has little choice but to settle. That gives NTP too much power over one of the most important technologies in the American economy. The case should serve as a warning that U. S. patent law is seriously out of balance. When companies that make things ( such as RIM) are held hostage to companies that merely use patents to make money in court ( such as NTP), then it is time for the courts and Congress to take a hard look at whether U. S. patent law is helping or hurting the innovation economy. The U. S. Constitution gives American inventors strong patent rights — in order, said Thomas Jefferson, to “ add the fuel of interest to the fire of genius.” But patent law is not supposed to be one- sided: The goal is to reward those who create new things but without choking off the creativity of others. It is a difficult balancing act, which has become dramatically more complicated in the digital age.
High- tech products may rely on thousands of different bits of technology and protecting them all with patents is not practical. That leaves many companies ( such as RIM) hostage to lawsuits over the intellectual property in each bit.
Faced with the threat of an automatic injunction, many companies settle such suits — even baseless ones — rather than bet the business by going to court.
That may be the best way to protect small inventors from big companies that steal their intellectual property. But it is not the wisest way to foster innovation.
Judges should have discretion to decide whether to impose an injunction, or just punish wrongdoing with monetary damages. They should take the broader public interest into account, including the interest of millions of businesspeople who depend on BlackBerrys. The Supreme Court — which will consider the injunction issue early next year — should waste no time in restoring a legal environment that is good for American innovation. This is an edited version of an editorial from the Financial Times, London.