Questioning NTP Patent Rights

From BusinessWeek.com:

"The people behind the Virginia holding company NTP struck gold when they settled a long-running patent dispute with Research In Motion (RIMM) for $612.5 million in March. They hope to do it again with a similar lawsuit against handheld maker Palm."

By way of reminder, NTP says it came up with the technology used by both companies to provide wireless paging services. But now, Oren Tavory, a 43-year-old software developer living in West Palm Beach, Fla., says he got there first.

Tavory says he's not listed as a co-inventor "through omission, inadvertence and/or error," and is seeking to change that.

That [patent] review process is ongoing, a point Palm made in a statement issued Nov. 7 in response to NTP's lawsuit. "All seven of the patents asserted are being re-examined by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office and have been rejected by the re-examiners as invalid.… Palm is disappointed that, after many months of silence and repeated rejections of NTP's claims by the PTO, NTP has chosen to sue on patents of doubtful validity."

A final dismissal of the patents wouldn't help Tavory's case, Conwell says. "We're not seeking to invalidate the patents at all," he says. "We're simply asking the court to add his name as a co-inventor, and to recognize his rights."

Read the full story here.