This Position Statement was first published in July 2001, at which time RIM was actively prosecuting its lawsuit against Glenayre.
In addition to publishing this document, the FPF took various other actions to oppose the patent. Among other things we provided assistance to the law firm of Christensen, O'Connor, Johnson and Kindness, Glenayre's legal representation in this matter. We provided our technical expertise to this firm in the preparation of their challenge to RIM's lawsuit, and in particular we identified and made the legal team aware of prior art which we believe demonstrates the invalidity of the patent. This prior art was subsequently presented to RIM during the discovery phase of the legal proceedings.
Our intention in providing this technical assistance to Glenayre was to see that the patent was conclusively defeated in the courts, permanently invalidating the patent.
However that is not how things turned out. Instead, RIM and Glenayre
announced in January 2002 that they had reached a private settlement,
in which each company agreed to dismiss its lawsuit against the other.
An announcement of the settlement is available on Glenayre's website
at
http://www.glenayre.com/NewsEvents/Glenayre_RIM_Final.htm. The same announcement
is also available on the FPF website at http://www.freeprotocols.org/rimBBPatentProblem/Glenayre_RIM_Final.htm.
The terms of their agreement included beneficial considerations to each party. One of these considerations was that Glenayre made an acknowledgement that it now considers the RIM patent to be valid.