Blackberry Patent Dispute Many companies face legal issues that can negatively affect their operations. Patent infringement lawsuits are recurring and appear to be a common legal problem in the technology sector. For the purposes of this article, I will discuss a patent legal dispute related to a recently settled lawsuit between Blackberry maker Research In Motion (RIM) and NTP, a small patent holding company. Furthermore, this article will also discuss the judicial procedure and structure as well as legal dispute resolution of NTP and RIM. In law, intellectual property (IP) is an umbrella term for various legal rights attached to certain types of information, ideas, or other intangible assets in their expressed form. The owner of this legal right is generally authorized to exercise various exclusive rights in relation to the subject matter of the intellectual property (http://en.wikepedia.org). Patents, trademarks and designs belong to a particular subset of intellectual property known as industrial property (http://en.wikepedia.org). Patent litigation has increased with the growth of the technology industry. According to Mohammed, the Blackberry litigation is the latest in a series of patent disputes that cast a shadow over corporate technology users (Mohammed, 2006). In order to understand the validity of such litigation, one must first understand patents and their infringement: a patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state to a person for a specified period of time in exchange for public disclosure and regulated certain details of a device, method, process or composition of matter (substance) (known as an invention) which is new, inventive and useful or industrially applicable. The exclusive right granted to the owner of a patent is the right to exclude others from making, using, selling, offering to sell or importing the claimed invention. The rights granted to the patent owner 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 prevent others from using the invention claimed in that patent. If the invention is used without the permission of the owner of the patent, the patent is considered infringed" (http://en.wikepedia.org). Patent infringement may be considered a direct, indirect or active inducement of infringement. In 1990, Thomas Campana Jr., an engineer and co-owner of NTP Inc., the company that held the patent, claimed to have developed technology that transmitted data via radio frequency, long before the Internet became an integral part of American life (Locy, 2006).