Ethics Newsline®

Last week at the annual conference of the National Governors Association (NGA), I walked through the bustling anthill of Washington’s J. W. Marriott Hotel in bemused wonder. Not at the governors themselves, whose amiable conversations belied their harried schedules. Not at their efficient staffs, whose ability to attend several meetings at once is legendary. And not at the corporate guests invited by the NGA to mix and mingle.

No, the wonder arose from what all of them had in common: the BlackBerry, the wireless email device whose maker, Research In Motion (RIM), last week settled a highly publicized patent-infringement suit.

Let me announce up front that I’m not a BlackBerry user; service in rural Maine is still too scanty. But one look around that hotel indicated why RIM had to settle: This handheld computer/cell phone has become indispensable to its 3.2 million U.S. users. Along the way, it has been rapidly changing not only our communications but our culture. What schoolteachers once called “unstructured free time” has, for BlackBerry owners at conferences, simply vanished. No break is now too brief, no crowd too dense, no meeting too important not to be overlaid with reading and replying to emails. As a result, a curious silence is falling on our busiest public spaces, punctuated only by the faint tapping of oversized fingers working doll-house-sized keyboards. In the past, break times were for face-to-face networking. These days, as Robert Frost once wrote about his native New England farmscape, “Men work alone, their lots plowed far apart.”

They can continue working alone now that the BlackBerry suit has been settled, but three thorny ethical issues remain:

The ethics of intellectual property. At issue in this case were several patents on inventions by an engineer, Thomas Campana, who developed a prototype wireless email system in 1987. The company he and a partner formed, NTP, filed suit against RIM in 2001. After a jury in 2002 found that RIM had infringed five of the patents, the pressure grew for a settlement. Now, however, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office seems poised to reject those patents — saying, in effect, that NTP never had an invention to be infringed. Nevertheless, rather than dragging the suit out and potentially discomforting its customers, RIM settled for $612.5 million.

Was this, then, a high-stakes bluff by NTP? If so, what does that tell us about the ethics of intellectual property law, when holders of invalid property claims can extract this sort of settlement? If , however, NTP proves to have a valid claim, what does that say about a Dickensian legal system that drags out claims for half a decade, damaging BlackBerry’s market because of the uncertainty?

The ethics of scale. U.S. District Court Judge James Spencer, who was set to rule last month on enforcing an injunction against BlackBerry, instead urged the parties to settle. Why? Because an injunction would have shut down BlackBerry service to all but government and emergency workers. Had BlackBerry been a boutique device with limited usage, that might not have mattered. But it is now so mainstreamed into the nation’s senior leadership that even NGA conferees would have felt the impact. True, as government employees they presumably would not have been shut down. But public servants are in daily communication with corporate, educational, nonprofit, professional, union, religious, and citizen leaders, all of whom would have been silenced. In practice, there is no way that government users — or emergency workers — could have been insulated from the injunction.

Did Judge Spencer recognize that uncomfortable reality? Bowing to it, did he in effect recognize that there is one interpretation of the law for the large and another for the small? Does that mean that large entities like RIM, simply because of their widespread influence for good and potential for harm, face different ethical standards than less prominent firms? If so, do they have ethical obligations to the culture that smaller entities don’t share? Would that fact always give tiny firms an unfair legal advantage over large ones — simply because the latter face moral hazards and have moral reasons to settle that smaller ones do not?

The ethics of scheduling. In one sense, the BlackBerry is simply a postal service operating at warp speed. More important, however, is its role as a tool that radically ramps up the pace of scheduling. At the NGA, people were using it to confirm meetings, share agendas, check available dates, and set up new meetings on the fly. So what looks like “lots plowed far apart” may in fact be a way to facilitate personal interconnections rather than to replace them. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that this year’s NGA set a new per capita record for personal meetings set up and consummated during four days. And why not? If someone your boss wants to meet is in the building, just email them — and trust that, despite whatever else they’re doing, they’ll drop it and get back to you.

Which raises another bemusing issue: Is the meaningfulness of one’s life tied to the density of one’s date book? Does our importance rise in proportion as our calendar grows impossibly full? Is it true that we are who we meet? In the world according to BlackBerry, that seems to be the case. Where, then, can we find time for the reflection, perspective, and recharging so central to creativity — and, not incidentally, so crucial to the moral life?

Maybe, now and then, an injunction should come along. Maybe, here and there, we should declare a BlackBerry holiday, just so people can relocate themselves among the thorn bushes.

©2006 Institute for Global Ethics