Patent firm seeks to bar Nokia, RIM and Palm from importing handhelds

IDG News Service - A patent-holding company based in Texas is seeking to bar five technology vendors — including Nokia Corp., Palm Inc. and BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. — from importing handheld devices into the U.S., for allegedly violating patents it owns.

Saxon Innovations LLC in Tyler, Texas, filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission on Dec. 19, and the ITC announced yesterday that it had voted to investigate the complaint. If the ITC finds that Saxon's claims are legitimate, it could bar the handheld makers from importing products that contain the patented technologies.

In 2007, Saxon, which has five employees, purchased about 180 patents. Some of them were formerly owned by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and others by Legerity Holdings Inc., a chip maker that was acquired that same year by Zarlink Semiconductor Inc.

At issue in Saxon's complaint about the handheld makers are three patents that the firm bought in July 2007: one for a keypad monitor that can be activated via external clock signals; one for an apparatus that can disable so-called interrupt masks within processors; and one for a device and methodology for supporting communications between the different processors in a multiprocessor architecture.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office originally issued the patents to AMD, in August 1993, June 1996 and March 1997, respectively.

In recent years, technology vendors, including Microsoft Corp., IBM and Intel Corp., have pushed Congress to approve legislation designed to limit the damages that patent holders could collect in infringement cases and create new procedures for challenging the validity of patents. Critics of the current patent system have complained that it's too easy for patent-holding companies to win large infringement awards.

Jim Balsillie, RIM's co-CEO, joined the chorus in 2006, praising efforts aimed at making it harder for patent owners filing infringement claims to get court injunctions against the companies they're targeting. In March of that year, RIM itself agreed to pay $612.5 million to a company called NTP Inc. to settle a patent dispute that was threatening the continuation of BlackBerry service in the U.S.

Saxon's complaint to the ITC alleges that Nokia's N73 mobile phone violates two of the three patents and that the vendor's N95 phone infringes on the third. RIM's BlackBerry Pearl 8100 device and Palm's Treo 700p also infringe on two of the patents, according to the complaint.