The Patent Masters Go After Cell Carriers

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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NTP, the same company that filed patent suits against RIMM, has filed claims against Verizon Wireless, AT&T (T) and Sprint (S). NTP won a $612.5 million judgment against the Blackberry maker.

NTP claims, according to The Wall Street Journal, the big cellular carriers infringe on its patents related to mobile email services. The win against RIMM may well help NTP’s cause.

Given the scope of the business at the nation’s three largest cell carriers, it would not be unimaginable that a winning case could involve damages in the hundreds or millions of billions of dollars. NTP has a least a fighting chance of getting license fees from the three companies who among them have about 180 million customers.

Betting against NTP at this point would be a bad idea.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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