RIM prepares for meltdown

Posted on 10 Feb 2006 at 10:38

Research In Motion, the manufacturer of the Blackberry wireless email device, is preparing for the worst.

The company is now seeking to reassure its thousands of corporate customers that if a court issues an injunction that orders an immediate shutdown of its operations in the United States. It has also prepared a new version of its software that does not infringe the disputed patents, which it is ready to distribute to its thousands of US customers.

On the 24th of February, RIM returns to court to face the prospect of its business in the United States being shut down. The judge may order that the company immediately cease using the disputed technology that infringes the patent owned by NTP.

Throughout the long running dispute both in the courts and through the US Patent Office, RIM has managed to whittle down the number of claims. Now, there are only nine claims relating to three NTP patents remaining in dispute. These relate to the implementations of certain aspects of the BlackBerry products and services. This now gives RIM sufficient wriggle room for it to be able to say it has been able to build its own patented workarounds in the underlying messaging system that will enable it to carry on operations.

The company has created a new 'Multimode Edition' of its Blackberry software which RIM will distribute to customers should the judge pull the plug. In the event, RIM will be able to switch modes in its US operations from its Network Operations Centre and activate 'US Mode' while the rest of the world continues in Standard Mode. The company says that the operation of the new software is intended to appear identical to users and administrators alike.

New customers will have the Multimode Edition supplied with their new handsets as standard.

As well as reassuring its existing customers, RIM says that the prospect of it producing a workaround which would totally evade the remaining patents may convince NTP to agree a 'reasonable' licensing agreement.

More details at www.blackberry.com/select/mme/index.shtml