RIM says, No lawsuits please, we're Canadian

Oh, the
humanity...

Blackberry maker/dealer Research In Motion has come up with a
clever new strategy to counter NTP's patent lawsuit  playing up theire
Canadian-ness. To get you up to speed: last year a federal court found that
RIM had violated about a dozen of NTP's patents, ordering them to stop
selling BlackBerry devices in the United States and pay NTP $53.7 million
in damages. RIM managed to get another court to stay the order while they
filed appeal, and last month an appeals cour overturned the injunction
barring them from selling BlackBerrys while upholding the most of the
patent infrignement counts. Heres where it gets interesting. Since RIMs
based in Canada, and so are their servers, they're now arguing that US
patent laws don't apply to them. Seems unlikely that they'll be able to
pull this one off, but they might be in luckNTP might not own those
patents either. Yeah, this makes things hopelessly complicated now, but a
company calledComputer Leasco Inc is suing NTP for patent infringement,
claiming that they're the ones that actually own the wireless email patents
in question.