RIM sues Kik for patent infringement

But I don't see this as significantly more evil than "just removing them from the store". A lawsuit shows that RIM has a serious grievance (whether justified or not) and moves to settle the matter of competition through an official legal framework (whether flawed or not).

Unilaterally removing an application from app markets that are "open to all developers unless we say they're not" for competitive reasons strikes me as more evil in some ways. We are just a lot more used to it because of Apple's app store.

BBM is the one killer-app keeping people using blackberries due to the network effect.

The only reason I still have a blackberry is because friends and family in far off countries also have them, and vice-versa - we cna talk to each other freely and easily on the run. BBM is really good at this. We would all have to switch to something new, and just as reliable, at the same time to make jumping platforms viable.

As soon as there is something that works as well as BBM that's cross platform, lots of people will jump ship as soon as they are able, as long as they can reach their BBM friends (who will eventually jump ship too)

Push email is now a commodity, via push IMAP, push Exchange, COMET webmail, and a bucketload of other apps.

BBM is one of the last things unique to BB. Of course it will inevitably be commoditized, but BB will try and delay this as long as possible using whatever tactics it can.

If you can get a nicer quality smartphone that does instant messaging, and push email, why would you want a BB with a poor quality web browser and a paltry few shitty quality apps?

I hope they lose the case and their patent is invalidated. (Isn’t this system highly similar to how Napster messaging and AIM “direct connection” chats worked, before 2004?)

Anyway, here’s another US patent that could be relevant. Seems even weaker, though: “A method of displaying messages on handheld devices. The device displays messages in a scrollable viewport of vertically arranged fields. Date separators inserted into the vertically arranged list of messages to enable the user to associate the messages with a date. …”

http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=6lKrAAAAEBAJ

C'mon now, let's not be quick to judge. What if this lawsuit had to do with Kik violating your privacy? Sharing your contacts' information, etc.

"As a trademark must be used to maintain rights in relation to that mark, a trademark can be 'abandoned' or its registration can be cancelled or revoked if the mark is not continuously used. By comparison, patents and copyrights cannot be 'abandoned' and a patent holder or copyright owner can generally enforce their rights without taking any particular action to maintain the patent or copyright."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark#Comparison_with_paten...

1. There's a thing called "laches", which basically makes it so you can't recover damages from before the time you file the suit if you waiting too long to file the suit. There's a rebuttable presumption that six years is too long.

What that means is that if you find out about the infringement and wait six or more years to file, you will get no damages from before the date of the suit unless you can prove to the court that there was justification for waiting so long.

If you file before six years, there is no presumption of laches, but the plaintiff can try to prove to the court that your delay was unreasonable.

Note that even if the plaintiff gets no damages, he can still get an injunction to stop continuing infringement regardless of how long he delays. Thus, in a case like this where RIM's likely goal is to kill the infringing product rather than to collect money for past infringement and perhaps license the product going forward laches is no problem.

2. I believe in some cases, the courts have used "equitable estoppel" to prevent the patent owner from taking any action against a particular defendant. For this to happen the patent would have had to do something that reasonably gave the defendant reason to believe they had permission to use the patent and the defendant would have had to rely on that.

Equitable estoppel doesn't necessarily involve a delay in suing, but a long delay would be a factor I'd expect the court to look at as it provides at least some support for the claim that the defendant reasonably thought they had permission.

An example of where I'd expect equitable estoppel to play a role would be if Microsoft ever decided to sue over the parts of Mono that are not covered by either the Community Promise (which covers the ISO/ECMA version of .NET) or the Apache license (which they have released much of the mobile .NET stuff under). Microsoft has ignored the potentially infringing parts of Mono for a long time, and has actively encouraged the Mono project as a whole and even made changes on Microsoft's end to make some of their stuff work better with Mono. I think the Mono people could make a good case that Microsoft's action gave them a reasonable belief that they were OK, and Microsoft knew that the Mono people thought that.