There was no joy in Ontario yesterday (not that there often is) as Research in Motion, the corporate branch on which BlackBerry wireless email devices grow, struck out at the United States Supreme Court. The justices declined to be drawn into a patent dispute, with the result that BlackBerries in use in private businesses may yet go out of service, leaving executives across the land to gnash their teeth and bark at their secretaries. Although the possible shutdown of private-sector BlackBerry service would be a costly inconvenience for businesses both here in America and and in other countries, allowing patent infringement in the name of the “public interest” would be even more costly.

In a case that has assumed the epic proportions of “The Forsyte Saga,” a patent holding company based in Virginia, NTP, is suing RIM claiming that the Canadian firm has exploited technology patented by NTP’s founder to build its BlackBerry empire. In the past year alone, RIM and NTP appeared to have reached a deal under which RIM would license the technology for a fee, but the arrangement collapsed. Then NTP won a ruling that would have shut down the network unless a judge hadn’t intervened with a stay. Now RIM claims it has developed a non-infringing technology that it could deploy to keep BlackBerries functioning in the event it loses its patent case. Analysts are speculating fiercely about whether the claim is true or whether RIM is just trying to leverage its way into a better settlement by threatening to walk away.

The Founding Fathers understood more than two centuries ago the promise of a fair and consistent patent system.* The legal guarantee that inventors will be able to enjoy the fruits of their labors has spurred generations of creativity and economic growth. It has often been inconvenient, prompting, say, calls to allow patent infringement as a way to deliver desperately needed medicines to the Third World. But denying incentives to invention would kill more people in the long run. By refusing to hear RIM’s claim that it should be beyond the reach of American patent laws because it’s lurking in Canada, the Supreme Court affirmed a key principle. It’s by no means certain the devices will go off the air, since they are more profitable to NTP if they are running and providing a revenue stream from which RIM can pay royalties. But it is certain that diluting patent law would have injured the American economy.

* This is Article 1, Section 8 bedrock, wherein Congress is given the power “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Joseph Story, citing an additional benefit in his commentaries, observes that “the only boon, which could be offered to inventors to disclose the secrets of their discoveries, would be the exclusive right and profit of them, as a monopoly for a limited period.” But the idea of granting patents was also highly controversial, with, ironically, the inveterate tinkerer, Thomas Jefferson, warning, in a letter written in 1813, “Considering the exclusive right to invention as given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society, I know well the difficulty of drawing a line between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not. As a member of the patent board for several years, while the law authorized a board to grant or refuse patents, I saw with what slow progress a system of general rules could be matured.”