While I agree with the consensus that this is evil (essentially cutting a start-up off at it's knees), RIM has a legal obligation to enforce that patent if they know someone is infringing or they risk losing it. The Kik founder should have been much more vocal about being booted and having his keys revoked; now he makes himself look like an easy target. He really needs to put PR pressure on RIM at this point if Kik is going to survive.
"As a trademark must be used to maintain rights in relation to that mark, a trademark can be 'abandoned' or its registration can be cancelled or revoked if the mark is not continuously used. By comparison, patents and copyrights cannot be 'abandoned' and a patent holder or copyright owner can generally enforce their rights without taking any particular action to maintain the patent or copyright."
IANAL, but does that make what I said wrong? He didn't say anything about setting precedent, he said they risk "losing" the patent if they do not enforce it, which is just not true. If you have a source saying otherwise, I'd love to see it.
IANAL, but I have a vague memory from a patent talk. So, I can't disprove you, but I can remain more skeptical of your claim, unless you're an IP lawyer -- in which case I'd assume you know something I don't.
Regarding the semantics of "lose" -- why does it matter in any discussion of real-world actions or motivations?
Even if I don't lose something, if I do things to erode its usefulness, I've essentially lost its functionality. Therefore regardless of whether I legally lose the thing or not, I'm going to resist doing things that (possibly) reduce its effectiveness -- the result (in terms of my actions) is the same.
You can't lose you patent by ignoring an infringer you know about. However, there are potentially bad consequences for the patent holder.
1. There's a thing called "laches", which basically makes it so you can't recover damages from before the time you file the suit if you waiting too long to file the suit. There's a rebuttable presumption that six years is too long.
What that means is that if you find out about the infringement and wait six or more years to file, you will get no damages from before the date of the suit unless you can prove to the court that there was justification for waiting so long.
If you file before six years, there is no presumption of laches, but the plaintiff can try to prove to the court that your delay was unreasonable.
Note that even if the plaintiff gets no damages, he can still get an injunction to stop continuing infringement regardless of how long he delays. Thus, in a case like this where RIM's likely goal is to kill the infringing product rather than to collect money for past infringement and perhaps license the product going forward laches is no problem.
2. I believe in some cases, the courts have used "equitable estoppel" to prevent the patent owner from taking any action against a particular defendant. For this to happen the patent would have had to do something that reasonably gave the defendant reason to believe they had permission to use the patent and the defendant would have had to rely on that.
Equitable estoppel doesn't necessarily involve a delay in suing, but a long delay would be a factor I'd expect the court to look at as it provides at least some support for the claim that the defendant reasonably thought they had permission.
An example of where I'd expect equitable estoppel to play a role would be if Microsoft ever decided to sue over the parts of Mono that are not covered by either the Community Promise (which covers the ISO/ECMA version of .NET) or the Apache license (which they have released much of the mobile .NET stuff under). Microsoft has ignored the potentially infringing parts of Mono for a long time, and has actively encouraged the Mono project as a whole and even made changes on Microsoft's end to make some of their stuff work better with Mono. I think the Mono people could make a good case that Microsoft's action gave them a reasonable belief that they were OK, and Microsoft knew that the Mono people thought that.
