An unseemly piece of gloating arrived in How the World Works' mailbox today, from an outfit called Patriot Scientific Corp. The e-mail started off by citing the $612 million settlement agreed to last Friday between RIM, the makers of the BlackBerry communications device, and NTP, a small software company that had sued RIM for patent infringement.
But that's nothing compared to what Patriot was about to extract from the entire world's computer industry, crowed the e-mail. Patriot "co-owns and markets core microprocessor architecture technology patents which affects every computer manufactured since 1994 and semiconductors which run faster than 120 MHz.
http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2006/03/06/patriot/index.html