In Canada, we've become super-sensitive to litigious patent holders given how NTP Inc. has being making life difficult for Research in Motion for the past four years. So, it's fascinating to see Rates Technology Inc. jump into the spotlight by suing Google for infringing on its VOIP patents. (Here's the lawsuit.)Like NTP, RTI is nothing more than a shell that holds patents and pursues licensing agreements. To be perfectly blunt, RTI is what NTP aspires to be when it grows up given RTI has agreements with more than 700 companies on a one-time, one-fee basis. In the patent world, once you bag a big prize (e.g. RIM), it's so much easier to convince other company's to enter into licenses. RTI's “hit list” features a who's who of the telecom world such as Lucent, Cisco, Nortel and Huawei. RTI's lawsuit activity has targeted Mitel Networks for $945-million and Alcatel for $1.15-billion. Rich Tehrani provides a lot of the juicy details about RTI following a conversation he had with RTI's Jerry Weinberg. If RIM's battle with NTP and RTI's licensing track record is any indication, Google would be wise to settle quickly to make RTI go away. From a bigger-picture perspective, do you think the activities and RTI and NTP will build momentum to look at how the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issues patents. In particular, it seems like there could be a backlash against the broad patents the USPTO grants, which have given many patent holder enormous legal clout because defendants have such a difficult time demonstrating they aren't infringing them. The key issue is whether these broad patents will deter innovation if patent “trolls” can easily solicit licensing fees out of companies developing new technology.
Update: The National Business Review has published a story on patent “trolling”, citing Rich Tehrani's interview.