People need to stop using criminal law analogies--they make what happened in the NTP case seem screwy, but it's really just a bad analogy. To quote from Dilbert, "Your tie is like Hitler on ice skates." Criminal law is criminal law; everything else isn't. (BTW, I love the idea of the Supreme Court taking a speeding ticket case. Truly.)
The settlement value of the case changed on a daily basis. The injunction gets closer, the value goes up; the PTO acts, the value goes down. Obviously, RIM decided that the balance finally tipped in favor of settling; they must believe that they stand to gain more than $600+M by virtue of continuing to do business as they have been, or that they stood to lose more than than that by virtue of deploying the workaround.
|