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Lawsuit could stop selling of BlackBerry e-mail devices in US

A federal court in the US on Friday refused a request from Research in Motion (RIM) to freeze a patent infringement lawsuit while it appealed the case to the Supreme Court.

The decision by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington leaves the door open for NTP Inc, a patent-holding company, to ask a lower court to impose an injunction granted two year ago against Research in Motion.

The injunction would stop Research in Motion from selling BlackBerry e-mail devices in the US and would force the company to stop providing e-mail services to all US customers except government account holders. That measure had been suspended to allow an appeal by Research in Motion, which the federal appeals court rejected early this month.

seek enforcement

"NTP will seek to reinstate the injunction," said Kevin Anderson, a lawyer for the company. "And RIM will seek to enforce its proffered settlement. NTP is confident about its position on both of those issues."

Research in Motion, which is based in Waterloo, Ontario, and NTP, whose only assets are some wireless e-mail patents, announ-ced in March that they had reached a US$450 million settlement in the three-year-old case. But the deal subsequently collapsed with each side accusing the other of adding unacceptable conditions.

After failing in the appeals court, Research in Motion asked for the stay on the lower court judgment to continue while it appealed to the Supreme Court. The company has acknowledged, however, that the highest court rarely hears patent cases.

In a statement on Friday, the company said it would ask the Supreme Court to freeze the injunction pending its application for appeal.

doubts

"While RIM maintains that an injunction is inappropriate given the facts of the case and substantial doubts raised subsequent to trial as to the validity of the patents in question, it ultimately will be up to the courts to decide these matters, and there can never be an assurance of a favorable outcome in any litigation," the statement said.

Because about 75 percent of the company's business is in the US, any shutdown in that market would be a significant blow to the company. However, government BlackBerry users would be exempted from any e-mail service shutdown, in part because NTP did not cite the government business in its lawsuit.

unlikely

The legal process to impose the injunction will most likely take weeks, if not months, making an immediate end to BlackBerry service unlikely.

One of Research in Motion's crucial arguments is that the case tries to push US laws beyond the country's borders because the disputed e-mail software at its heart resides only on servers near the company's head office in Canada.
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