The real story in the BlackBerry lawsuit isn't even being looked at - the utter absurdity of the patent at issue. Here's the story from the point of view of the outfit that went after RIM:

He caught his breath when he saw the RIM story. For a decade, Mr. Stout and his long-time client, Chicago inventor Thomas Campana Jr., had been patiently sitting on a batch of patents for a system to send text messages from computers to wireless devices.

Knockoffs. Amateurs. Who was RIM kidding? That's our technology, Mr. Stout thought. He picked up the phone, setting off an improbable chain of events that has ignited one of the most celebrated intellectual property showdowns in U.S. history. The fateful call put two proud inventors -- one Canadian and one American -- on a collision course that goes to the essence of what it means to develop something new, claim it as yours and then make it wildly popular, even indispensable.

So Campana claimed it's some kind of innovation that he figured out - apparently all by himself - that if a wireless device is on a network - then gosh! You can use SMTP to direct email messages to an address, and the client device can use POP (or IMAP) to yank them down. Wow - I'm so glad he came up with that, and even happier that some uninformed yutz at the PTO handed him a "poach on the industry for free" card. RIM is no better here; they wanted to be the same kind of gatekeeper, and just ended up on the short end of the stick.

Is minimal technical literacy too hard to ask for at the PTO? I guess so.