Research In Motion announced that the preliminary report from the US Patent Office shows that NTP has lost another patent to RIM’s challenges. This will likely have a large efect on the lawsuit NTP brought against RIM for patent infringement. A settlement was reached but RIM backed out once it appeared the patents wouldn’t hold up to review.

All 665 claims in this NTP patent were unanimously rejected by a panel of three senior patent examiners in the initial ruling. The USPTO ruling cited a variety of reasons including the TeleNor prior art submitted recently by RIM, as well as RIM’s own single mailbox integration patent (#6,219,694) which was determined by the USPTO to have been invented prior to the NTP patent filing.

This case is far from over as NTP is expected to appeal all of the patent rulings (including the latest there are 8, all in favor of RIM).