NTP goes after Palm in patent infringement lawsuit

6 November 2006 20:57 GMT / By Stuart Miles

NTP the company who famously and successfully sued BlackBerry for breach of patents has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Palm, maker of the Treo smartphone.

NTP said its suit asserts that Sunnyvale, CA-based Palm's "products, services, systems and processes infringe NTP's patents".

The company said it seeks injunctive relief "to prevent Palm from continuing to infringe on NTP's patents directly and indirectly", as well as monetary damages it did not specify.

Accrording to Palm, the The NTP lawsuit claims that certain Palm products infringe seven NTP patents. All seven of the patents asserted are being re-examined by the US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) and have been rejected by the re-examiners as invalid. Palm also noted that the NTP patents disclose a pager-based email service that has nothing in common with the mobile-computing devices invented by Palm.

Palm has said that while it "respects legitimate intellectual property rights, it will defend itself vigorously against the attempted misuse of the patent and judicial systems to extract monetary value for rights to patents that may ultimately have no value at all".

NTP, Inc. is a Virginia-based patent holding company, founded in 1992 with a portfolio of 50 US patents and additional pending US and international patent applications.

Research in Motion's long patent dispute ended in March with RIM paying NTP $612.5 million

NTP, which had claimed RIM stole its technology, had tried to get the Blackberry service shut in the US.

"NTP grants RIM an unfettered right to continue its business, including its Blackberry-related business", a spokesperson for NTP said at the time.

The settlement brought 4 years of legal dispute in the US between the two companies to an end.

Full tags

Biz, Lawsuits, Patents, Palm, NTP, PSP, YouTube