Research In Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry e-mail device, announced yesterday it has settled its long-running patent dispute with a small Virginia-based firm, averting a possible court-ordered shutdown of the BlackBerry system.
RIM has paid NTP $612.5 million in a "full and final settlement of all claims," the companies said.
At a hearing last week, NTP had asked a federal court in Richmond, Va., for an injunction blocking the continued use of key technologies underpinning the BlackBerry wireless e-mail service.
At the hearing Friday, Judge James R. Spencer expressed impatience with RIM and urged a settlement.
"He basically questioned the sanity of RIM, and said it wasn't acting very rationally," said Rod Thompson, patent attorney at Farella, Braun and Martel in San Francisco. "His prodding of the parties worked." The settlement is on the low end of expectations, Thompson said, especially since RIM will not have to pay any future royalties. There had also been talk of NTP receiving a stake in RIM.
Shares of RIM shot up $13.35, or 13%, to $85.27 during after-hours trading, when the settlement was announced. They had closed 53 cents higher at $71.92 in regular trading.
RIM, which is based in Waterloo, Ontario, had already put away $450 million in escrow, the amount of a settlement in 2005 that later fell apart. RIM will record the additional $162.5 million in its fourth-quarter results, it said.
The settlement ends a period of anxiety for many of the more than 3 million BlackBerry users in the United States. Uncertainty over the outcome had some customers wondering whether they would experiences brief outages or even a shutdown.
"I'm relieved," said Matt Lattman, a management consultant in Boston. "I've had it for about a year, and at this point, I can't imagine life without it." RIM said that it had added 620,000 to 630,000 new subscribers in the fiscal fourth quarter, which ended in February, below the 700,000 to 750,000 it had estimated in December. It blamed the shortfall on unexpectedly high uncertainty among customers about the litigation.
RIM attorneys also noted that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, in a proceeding parallel to the Virginia case, was poised to finally reject all patents at the heart of the case.
Originally published on March 4, 2006
