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April 16, 2007
UXB in patent wars?
The term "UXB" usually refers to "unexploded bomb". That is what might be lurking in the patent wars over email technology (think Blackberry - NTP patent case). According to a story in the New York Times, E-Mail Innovator Plans to Enlist in the Wireless Campaign of the Patent Wars, there is a new development that could invalidate a number of patents:
Nicholas Fodor is about to dive into the patent wars that have tangled up the business of wireless e-mail. But his weapon of choice is not a lawsuit. It is a new e-mail service he is developing using the knowledge gained from years of experience with e-mail software.
Mr. Fodor, 43, a French computer programmer, said that in the early 1990s he worked on “push” e-mail services that predated the filing of important patents in this area.
He intends to test his claims as soon as next month by introducing Freedom Mail, a simple free service that he says will make it possible to view and respond to messages sent to almost any e-mail account on a cellphone or other mobile device.
. . .
If it works as promised, Freedom Mail will compete with highly profitable services like those provided by Research in Motion, and could also undermine the lucrative patent portfolios of NTP and Visto, two firms that have won hundreds of millions of dollars in court with claims that they invented the idea of wireless electronic mail and mail synchronization.
“Visto could have some real problems,” said Gregory Aharonian, publisher of Internet Patent News Service, an industry newsletter, and an intellectual property consultant who has worked with Visto in the past. He said that once the service became widely available, “everyone they are suing is going to slap them with discovery requests to find out how much they knew about Mr. Fodor’s software.”
Mr. Fodor, who founded SetNet in Florida in 1993, said he was the first to offer a commercial product that could synchronize e-mail between machines.
He demonstrated e-mail synchronization in 1996 at an industry conference, three years before Visto received its first patent for the idea of synchronizing “work spaces” over a network in 1999.
SetNet’s software, which was sold in partnership with Hewlett-Packard beginning in 2002, could be viewed as important “prior art” in the intellectual-property wars that have pitted Visto and its investment partner, NTP, against Seven Networks and Motorola’s Good Technology Group, as well as Microsoft and Research in Motion.
Keep an eye on this one!
Posted by Ken Jarboe at April 16, 2007 12:29 PM
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