Final talks in a patent-infringement lawsuit involving the popular BlackBerry e-mail messaging device have reached an impasse, the two companies involved said on Thursday, raising the possibility that the BlackBerry service could be banned from the US market.
The two companies, Research in Motion of Waterloo, Ontario, which makes the BlackBerry, and NTP, a small patent-holding company in Arlington, Virginia, reached a settlement in March to end a three-and-a-half-year-old infringement suit. RIM agreed at the time to pay NTP the unusually large sum of US$450 million to end the lawsuit.
On Thursday, however, it was apparent that negotiations to reach a final settlement had failed.
Late Wednesday night, RIM asked a US federal court to enforce the settlement reached in March.
Meanwhile, in court papers filed Thursday, NTP denied that the settlement was ever clear-cut, and urged the court to reject RIM's request.
In a conference call Thursday with analysts, James Balsillie, the chairman and co-chief executive of RIM, said he could not comment on the specifics of why the talks had foundered, citing a confidentiality agreement between the two companies. He emphasized, though, that RIM had not tried to alter the settlement's terms, and blamed NTP for the impasse.
"This is an enormous amount of money, one of the largest settlements in the history of any patent system," Balsillie said. "I'm at a loss to understand what in the world one would want beyond that."
In its filing, however, NTP said that it had pressed RIM for a complete set of documents detailing the terms of the agreement during three days of negotiations in March.
"Nevertheless, because of RIM's pressing need to leave town, the signed agreement was limited to a vague, ambiguously worded term sheet," the court papers said.
NTP had won the right to ban Blackberry e-mail in the US in an earlier court decision, but that ruling was suspended when RIM appealed. In its filing on Thursday, however, NTP said that if no settlement was reached, it would again ask for an injunction on the sale of BlackBerry pagers and e-mail service in the US.
Research in Motion is dependent on Blackberry sales in the US for about 75 percent of its revenues.
Gregory Upchurch, an intellectual property lawyer in St. Louis, said that about 80 percent of the time, courts enforced previously announced settlements.
"Courts are in the business of resolving disputes," he said. "They don't like cases coming back from the dead."
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
US CONSCULTANT: The US Department of Commerce’s Ursula Burns is a rarely seen US government consultant to be put forward to sit on the board, nominated as an independent director Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, yesterday nominated 10 candidates for its new board of directors, including Ursula Burns from the US Department of Commerce. It is rare that TSMC has nominated a US government consultant to sit on its board. Burns was nominated as one of seven independent directors. She is vice chair of the department’s Advisory Council on Supply Chain Competitiveness. Burns is to stand for election at TSMC’s annual shareholders’ meeting on June 4 along with the rest of the candidates. TSMC chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) was not on the list after in December last