Blackberry Patent Dispute Many companies are facing legal issues that can negatively impact their operations. Patent infringement lawsuits happen again and seem to be a common legal issue in the tech industry. For the purposes of this article I will be discussing a patent legal dispute as it pertains to a recently settled lawsuit between Blackberry manufacturing, Research In Motion (RIM), and NTP, a small patent holding company. Furthermore, this document will also discuss the process and structure of the courts, as well as the resolution of NTP and RIM legal disputes. In law, intellectual property (IP) is an umbrella term for various legal rights associated with certain types of information, ideas, or other intangible assets in their expressed form. The owner of this legal right is generally entitled to exercise various exclusive rights in relation to the subject matter of the intellectual property (http://en.wikepedia.org). Patents, trademarks and designs fall into a particular subset of intellectual property known as industrial property (http://en.wikipedia.org). Patent disputes have increased as the technology sector has grown. According to Mohammed, the Blackberry controversy is the latest in a series of patent disputes that have cast a shadow over corporate users of the technology (Mohammed, 2006). To understand the validity of such a dispute it is necessary to first understand patents and patent infringement: a patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state to a person for a fixed period of time in exchange for public and regulated disclosure of certain details of a device, method, process or composition of matter (substance) (known as an invention) that is new, inventive and useful or industrially applicable. The exclusive right granted to the patent owner is the right to prevent others from making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing the claimed invention. The rights granted to the patent holder do not include the right to make, use or sell the invention itself. The patent owner may have to comply with other laws and regulations to use the claimed invention. (http://en.wikepedia.org)"A patent gives the owner of that patent the right to exclude others from using the invention claimed in that patent. If the invention is used without the permission of the patent owner, the patent is considered infringed" (http://en.wikipedia.org). Patent infringement can be considered direct, indirect or active inducement of infringement. In 1990 Thomas Campana Jr., an engineer and co-owner of NTP Inc., the patent-holding company, claims to have developed technology that transmits data via radio frequency, long before the Internet became an integral part of American life (Locy, 2006).