Case Study RIM

Protecting Intellectual Property

In researching the company Research In Motion (RIM) in this week's case study I have found that in an article written in 2009, that in order to maintain its intellectual secrets , it recorded employees conversations, as with many communications employers they provide employees with company devices as a promotion tactic, however the one catch is that the employee has no rights to the emails sent through these devices, to avoid this the employee has to purchase their own device to avoid any chat or email message from being recorded by RIM. The reasoning given for this practice indicated RIM relied on their intellectual property, to prevent disclosure involving beta releases, preventing photographing the devices by anyone that come in contact with employees of RIM. In any realm of technology and that includes that of the company RIM it people are its weakest link, and with many companies they have employees sign disclosure documents, as a way to protect company products or designs because many of the employees are testers of the products, figuring out any bugs or software glitches before introducing / selling to the general public. Employees had to disclose if the device was either lost or stolen, so that RIM could take any corrective action to protect its trade secrets (Tindal).

Interestingly enough RIM itself faced a lawsuit by NTP, a patent holding company (Harris), the suit was settlement was at $612.5 million, this involved technology that was patented by NTP, the type was not mentioned, but the effect of this settlement also gave rise for NTP to pursue companies such as Apple, Google, our beloved Microsoft, and a host of others (Harris). Here RIM should have taken advantage of the Patent laws, did their homework by either ensuring the technology used in their devices did not match or appear as that of NTP's, they may have avoided the lawsuit.

What motivated of influenced RIM

In another instance RIM in 2008 attempted its own $66 million hostile takeover of Mississauga, a Canadian based company that specialized in curve cryptography (Schick). This is was its attempt to via for Government contracts, just as its counterpart Motorola, as with all forms of Government encryption is a high concern, in transmitting messages.

In 2011, due to its popularity as a social network Rims was under fire for its trademark "BBM" (Molen) though both are in different industries, the battle over the trademark BBM was settled by the Canadian Intellectual