In my (somewhat limited) understanding, this is a fairly common business
practice. Why did NCR wait so long, as opposed to filing the suit when the
Pilot first came out? Well, obviously, the existence of the (Palm)Pilot
didn't come to the attention of the folks at NCR until just recently :-).
Seriously, I'm sure they waited until the time was right, i.e. until the
Palm had achieved sufficient success so that 1) it won't be going the way of
BetaMax VCRs anytime soon (because if it was going to die soon, it wouldn't
be worth anyone's time to file the lawsuit), and 2) whoever owns Palm at the
moment wouldn't want to just give up. The goal of the lawsuit is not to get
Palm to stop selling Palms; that would be silly and would gain NCR nothing.
The goal, as in most things, is to make some money. The Palm is now
successful enough that it's not going away, and it's successful enough that
Palm will gladly pay (or so NCR hopes) to be able to keep selling them. Most
likely, there will be a quiet out of court settlement, the terms of which
will never be known, but will either involve a lump sum payment to NCR or
some small royalty on each device sold. Unless, of course, the folks at Palm
have the guts to fight it all the way to trial. I wouldn't bet on the
outcome, then; patents are funny things. What we laymen would consider
obviously groundless, the law may see differently.
Oh, and why is NCR not suing WinCe or Psion? Obviously, because they haven't
hit that "sufficient success" criteria.
--Jim Preston
"Ng Wei Gee" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:42649@palm-dev-forum...
>
> > I wonder how much success NCR will have in it's lawsuit against Palm
> > and Handspring? They have asked for a jury trial and have asked that
> > Palm be prevented from making devices.
>
> IMHO, this is a totally absurb lawsuit. Though I haven't read the patent
> (and I won't understand even if I did :) ), why bring up such an old
patent
> *all of a sudden* for a lawsuit? And notice that WinCE, Psion and some
other
> handhelds are noticably absent from the lawsuit...
>
> Regards,
> Gee.
>
>
>
>
--
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