Saturday, March 04, 2006

Blackberry Users Breathe a Sigh of Relief

RIM Settles with NTP

While the Blackberry issue doesn't appear on the surface to be related to Santa Clarita Real Estate, once you realize how much it's used in the industry you'll understand the potential impact if the Blackberry service was to be discontinued.

While there are other PDA phone options available, the Blackberry system remains very popular in Corporate America. Your Realtor likely uses an alternative like the Treo 650 because of its ability to multitask with Realtor-specific software products. However, the service providers that are required for a successful real estate transaction quite often use Blackberry's. Lenders, title companies and others use their Blackberry's to quickly address issues that may arise in a typical real estate transaction.

RIM has agreed to settle with NTP for a reported $612.5 million.

According to the Chicago Tribune, NTP was reportedly trying to get as much as $1 billion from RIM. But over the past few months, the U.S. Patent Office has been reviewing NTP's patents and rejecting them. NTP has a long legal path to challenge those rejections, one that could drag on for a several years.

Still, "those [NTP] patents could [now] have a clock ticking against them," said George Wheeler, an intellectual property lawyer at McAndrews, Held & Malloy Ltd. in Chicago.

David Airan, a patent attorney at Leydig, Voit & Mayer Ltd. in Chicago, agreed. "There was too much on the table for NTP to risk not settling."

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Linda Slocum
HoneyStartPacking.com

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