The story of NTP, RIM and wireless patents that were too late
New York Times Sunday Edition has an excellent piece of investigative reporting by John Markoff. When NTP received a hefty payoff of $612.5 million from Research in Motion, not all of their patents might have described the original inventions. Geoff Goodfellow, formerly of Stanford Research Institute and then RadioMail, have had a working wireless data paging system working a decade before NTP patents were filed for. However, Goodfellow intentionally decided to skip on patents, thinking that technology might grow into a larger industry if there were no patents and licenses involved. NTP hired Goodfellow as a consultant before suing RIM in order to “clarify” the nature of his inventions, according to New York Times article.