The Hindu Business Line : `Push'ing complexity into e-mails

If you're `New to BlackBerry' there's help available on www.blackberry.com, which explains the product as one that offers wireless solutions, and provides access to a wide range of applications on a variety of devices.

Why BlackBerry, if you were to ask, there are ready answers on the site that a single device would be enough for your data and voice needs so you wouldn't need to carry a separate PDA (personal digital assistant), laptop or mobile phone; that it would achieve integration, allowing you to "open a Web page from an e-mail message, dial a number from a Web page, send an e-mail from your address book and more"; that it works on `Push' technology, so e-mail or data find you; and that it's available from "95 wireless carriers in 40 countries".

Pushing that aside, if we return to the case on hand, you'd know that "the technology at issue relates to systems for integrating existing electronic mail systems (`wireline' systems) with radio frequency (`RF') wireless communication networks, to enable a mobile user to receive e-mail over a wireless network".

Well, that's how the text of the court's decision, running to 75 pages, describes the `background', before providing an overview of traditional e-mail technology.

As you know, sending e-mail involves a sequence of steps beginning with the composing of the message using an `e-mail client' such as Outlook or Hotmail that provides the user interface.

The `sent' message gets transferred "first from the sender's machine to his or her ISP", and from there to the recipient's ISP mail server.

The message is stored in the recipient's mailbox, till he/she initiates a connection with the server to download the message off the server.

"This configuration is commonly referred to as a `pull' system because e-mails cannot be distributed to the user's machine without a connection being initiated by the user to `pull' the messages from the mail server," notes the judgment of the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

"Pull the string, and it will follow wherever you wish. Push it, and it will go nowhere at all," is a quote of Dwight D.

Eisenhower that may not apply to e-mails that work on both the technologies!

Patents-in-suit were of inventors Thomas J. Campana, Jr, Michael P. Ponschke, and Gary F. Thelen, collectively referred to as Campana in the judgment.

The trio had developed an electronic mail system to integrate existing e-mail systems with RF wireless communications networks.

On this, there's the helpful education part that the court fulfils, by paraphrasing the technology.

"In simplified terms, the Campana invention operates in the following manner: A message originating in an electronic mail system may be transmitted not only by wireline but also via RF, in which case it is received by the user and stored on his or her mobile RF receiver.

The user can view the message on the RF receiver and, at some later point, connect the RF receiver to a fixed destination processor, i.e., his or her personal desktop computer, and transfer the stored message."

How does that help? Because intermediate transmission to the RF receiver eliminates the need that the destination processor be turned on and carried with the user to receive messages.

Thus, a user can access his or her e-mail stored on the RF receiver, and review its content without interaction with the destination processor, while reserving the ability to transfer the stored messages automatically to the destination processor.

Next comes a discussion of `The Accused System', on the product in focus. "RIM sells the accused BlackBerry system, which allows out-of-office users to continue to receive and send electronic mail, or `e-mail' communications, using a small wireless device," reads the verdict and lists the components: "(1) the BlackBerry hand-held unit (also referred to as the `BlackBerry Pager'); (2) e-mail redirector software (such as the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (`BES'), the Desktop Redirector, or the Internet Redirector); and (3) access to a nationwide wireless network (such as Mobitex, DataTAC, or GPRS)."

The court had to be busy with the `push' technology that RIM used for routing messages to the user's hand-held device without user-initiated connection.

RIM implemented it more than one way.

For instance, the `Desktop' solution has BlackBerry's e-mail redirector software installed on the user's PC, while the `Corporate' version, has another solution installed on the organisational user's mail server, to function for multiple users of that server.

Yet another variety was RIM's Internet solution that operates similar to the corporate one but the `redirector' was different.

What was common in the solutions was that the BlackBerry e-mail redirector software merged seamlessly with the user's existing e-mail system, observed the court, and looked also at RIM's system for hand-held devices where the functionality gets achieved through the integration of an RF transmitter.

One of the points on which the Circuit Court faulted the district court was the latter's construing of the patent claim phrase `originating processor'.

This occurs in many places in the text of the court's ruling, including in the recital of the patent, as in: "... the electronic mail system transmits other originated information from one of the plurality of originating processors in the electronic mail system to at least one of the plurality of destination processors in the electronic mail system through a wireline without transmission using the RF information transmission network."

RIM had agreed to pay $450 million to settle the dispute with NTP Inc, the appellants.

But NTP had sought more. While RIM was interested in getting NTP abide by the settlement, the new ruling from the Federal Circuit court would compel RIM to change its product, or take it off the market in the US, "site of about 75 per cent of sales", as Bloomberg reports.

Meanwhile, RIM awaits a US Patent and Trademark Office review of the patents.

Of interest is a snatch where the Circuit Court refers to the district court's construing of `electronic mail system': "A type of communication system which includes a plurality of processors running electronic mail programming wherein the processors and the electronic mail programming are configured to permit communication by way of electronic mail messages among recognised users of the electronic mail system.

The various constituent processors in the electronic mail system typically function as both `originating processors' and `destination processors'."

In order to shake a hypothesis, it is sometimes not necessary to do anything more than push it as far as it will go, said Denis Diderot. One may say that of litigation too, especially in the field of patents.

An ideal read for techies.

Cases@TheHindu.co.in

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