Despite recent criticism of the U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office, including sharp words from push e-mail provider Research In
Motion Ltd. (RIM), a cofounder of Visto Corp. says the patent
office has been a great success.
RIM, the BlackBerry maker that recently agreed to pay US$612
million to settle a long-running patent infringement case, placed
an advertisement in several newspapers this week thanking its
supporters and also saying the patent system is in need of
change.
"As to the lingering question of why the patent system should
allow such a bizarre set of circumstances to threaten millions of
American consumers in the first place, we share your concern," the
company wrote.
While he contends that there's always room for improvement,
Daniel Mendez, Visto co-founder and chief strategy officer, defends
the patent office. "At any point in time people look at [the patent
office] and say it's broken, it's a disaster, it needs to be
revamped, but if you judge by the results, they're fantastic," he
said. The U.S. patent office for around 200 years has presided over
more innovation than any other country within the same time frame,
he said.
RIM agreed to settle its patent dispute with NTP Inc. earlier
this month, even though the patent office had preliminarily ruled
that the NTP patents were invalid. Due to what RIM calls a
loophole, the legal battle was allowed to progress regardless of
the patent office rulings.
Visto has clearly worked the existing patent office system to
its benefit. Over the past few years, Visto has filed patent
infringement suits against many of the leading push e-mail players,
including Infowave Software Inc., Seven Networks Inc., Good
Technology Inc. and Microsoft Corp. Most of the suits are still
outstanding except for Infowave, which settled in 2004, agreeing to
license Visto's software.
Perhaps in a show of solidarity against RIM, late last year
Visto signed a licensing agreement with NTP, which also acquired an
equity stake in Visto.
All this litigation among push e-mail companies points to a
market with large potential, Mendez said. The litigation is
happening because there are a couple companies that have been
around for many years, yet the market is only now showing
significant potential, drawing new competitors in, he said.
"That's a confluence of circumstances that you see very
infrequently, and that's why there is more turmoil in this space,"
he said.
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