Bush Administration Intercedes in BlackBerry Patent Case

NTP v. Research-in-Motion (Fed.Cir. 2005)

In this ongoing patent infringement case involving the Canadian RIM’s BlackBerry system, the U.S. Government has submitted a brief to District Court Judge Spencer.  The brief notes that under Trojan v. Shat-R-Shield, the Federal Government cannot be enjoined against using a patented invention and thus, asks the court to fashion any injunction in such a way to continue to allow the U.S. Government workers to continue to use the BlackBerry.

According to the Government brief, at this point, RIM has no way to distinguish between U.S. Government users and private users. Thus, the Government proposes the following options:

  1. Require RIM to create a whitelist of U.S. Government devices and users
  2. The Government is in the process of determining how long it would take to provide user names and information to RIM, and thus asked for a 90 day stay in the proceedings to determine whether they believe an injunction would implicate other public interests.

Chief Judge James R. Spencer is a Reagan appointee and Harvard Law graduate.

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One thought on “Bush Administration Intercedes in BlackBerry Patent Case

  1. 1

    addicted to the (patent infringing) BlackBerry

    I have two confessions: First, I don’t own a BlackBerry (but, if I did, I’d probably be addicted to checking my email). Second, I haven’t been closely following the patent infringement lawsuit by NTP Ltd. against BlackBerry’s maker, RIM, –…

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