that s-all-it-took? dept
Mon, Apr 17th 2006 3:29am
Mike Masnick
One of the more amazing things as the NTP/RIM patent lawsuit came to a close was the way that NTP s defenders seemed to completely ignore two important aspects of the case: they would not discuss prior art and they absolutely refused to entertain the idea that NTP s patents were on an obvious idea. This was even as the US Patent Office was busy invalidating each and every patent admitting that they d made a mistake in granting them in the first place. The NY Times has dug up one of the more interesting hidden elements of the case: the fact that the basic idea of wireless email that Thomas Campana patented, and which eventually were the core of NTP s case, had clear prior art in the work of Geoff Goodfellow, who had done work on such ideas a decade before Campana. Goodfellow, however, chose not to patent the concept, echoing things that we ve said repeatedly here: