NEW YORK (FORTUNE) - What would Osama bin Laden give to be able to knock out every BlackBerry in America and achieve an instant, sweeping disruption of commerce? The good news is he can't do it. The weird and disconcerting news is that a company called NTP can and, unless it's paid off, probably will sometime before Christmas.
NTP has this remarkable power because it is nearing victory in its four-year-old patent litigation with Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry. RIM faces the real likelihood of a court-ordered BlackBerry blackout (government devices would be exempted) unless it agrees to pay essentially whatever sum NTP names, which some analysts think will approach ten figures.
However the endgame plays out, it vividly illustrates a recurring lightning-rod issue in patent debates -- one that pits the information technology industry, which favors reform, against many others, such as the pharmaceutical industry, which don't. Should plaintiffs like NTP -- which does not market a competing product, never has, and never will -- be entitled to an automatic injunction shutting down a productive infringer such as RIM?NTP was founded in 1991 by the late inventor Thomas Campana and his patent attorney, Donald Stout, of Arlington, Va. It has no employees and makes no products. Its main assets, Campana's patents, have spent most of the past decade in Stout's file drawer. But in 2002 a federal jury found that RIM had infringed five NTP patents that relate to integrating e-mail systems with wireless networks. An appellate court largely agreed in August 2005, and in late October the U.S. Supreme Court declined to issue a stay while it ponders whether to hear the case.