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Who knew that Lotus Notes, IBM’s personal office software, would have come back to help Research In Motion. The software was the deciding factor in Visto Corporation’s patent infringement suit against RIM, which resulted in the rejection of Visto’s patent. There are still two outstanding patents which Visto claims were violated by the BlackBerry. The case is not scheduled to be heard until July 2008, which leaves plenty of time for further patent rejection.

Visto claims its patents cover the software used by RIM to synchronize e-mail across secured networks. It appeared that Visto had a solid case — that is, until the first of their patent claims was rejected. Last week, the second one was thrown out because it had already been used by Lotus Notes before Visto filed for the patent in 2000.

There have been a ton of patent-infringement suits in the telecommunications industry lately. NTP Inc. is famously in court now with many major cellular carriers over patents. RIM has a history with NTP, as the former was targeted by the latter in a patent-infringement suit. Three NTP patents have been rejected as a result.

This does speak to the necessity of reforming patent law in the US. So much time is being wasted by reviewing these patents, only to have them rejected. We can save a lot of time and energy by putting in more reasonable standards. That seems like a long way off, though.

[The Record]

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