New York:
NTP, a patent-holding company best known for prying a settlement of more than $600 million from the maker of the BlackBerry, is now suing the other big names in the smartphone industry: Apple, Google, Microsoft, HTC, LG and Motorola.
The suits, filed late Thursday afternoon in federal district court in Richmond, Va., charge that the cellphone e-mail systems of those companies are illegally using NTP's patented technology.
The round of litigation against leaders in the smartphone hardware and software market is the latest step by NTP to assert that its intellectual property is the foundation of modern wireless e-mail systems and that major corporations are infringing with impunity. Its critics have said that NTP has consistently inflated the importance of its innovations and that it is the very model of a patent troll, a company that produces no product or service other than licensing demands and lawsuits.
NTP and Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry, fought in the courts for years, with NTP fending off most legal challenges. Indeed, RIM settled with NTP in 2006, a few months after the Supreme Court refused to hear the Canadian company's appeal. The $612.5 million pact included a perpetual license for RIM to NTP's technology.
The potential payday for NTP in the current litigation is uncertain. It could be as much as several hundred million dollars, legal experts say. But it could be far less because technology and product designs change quickly and recent smartphone e-mail systems may well have been designed with an eye toward avoiding NTP's patents.
The companies named as defendants in the suits declined to comment.
But whatever the outcome in the latest suits, NTP has already altered the patent economy, legal experts say. Big technology companies, they say, no longer ignore sizable patent clusters in their field, but go looking for them. RIM, by contrast, first learned of the NTP infringement claim in a letter in 2000, when the Virginia company tried to persuade RIM to license its technology.
NTP was founded in 1992 by an engineer and inventor, Thomas J Campana Jr, and Donald E Stout, a lawyer. Its initial patents grew out of work that Mr Campana, who died in 2004, had done in 1990 for AT&T for relaying messages from a computer to a wireless device - a pager or a cellphone. His collection of patented technology covers wireless e-mail and the design of radio antennas used on mobile devices.
He never did commercialise his technology. But the NTP claim is that despite all the work done by others in the field, Mr. Campana was indeed the creator of wireless e-mail. And NTP, a private company owned by about 30 investors, is wielding those patents in its new lawsuits.
"Every infringer is now on notice," said Ron Epstein, counsel to NTP. "They are going to have to deal with this instead of trying to wait it out."
The NTP patents expire in 2012.
In recent years, big companies have increasingly turned to patent-buying groups like Intellectual Ventures, RPX and Allied Security Trust, a nonprofit organization. These groups essentially provide big companies with insurance against lawsuits on the patents they hold or license, in return for fees or investments.
The RIM case, said Robert P Merges, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, proved to be "a major milestone in the evolution of the patent ecosystem," spurring the adoption of tactics to reduce the risk of huge payouts.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office also conducted a lengthy re-examination of NTP's patents. That process winnowed the company's portfolio of legally valid patents.
But last December, the patent office's board of appeals ruled that 67 of NTP's patent claims in four patents were valid, including three claims that RIM was found to have infringed. NTP filed a petition with a federal appeals court to overturn other patent claims that the patent office rejected.
A previous group of suits, filed by NTP in 2007 against several telecommunications carriers, was stayed pending the outcome of the patent review. The companies sued in the carrier suits included AT&T, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless. Those cases have not yet been settled or come to trial.
A few companies other than RIM have licensed NTP's mobile e-mail patents, including Nokia and Good Technology.