Six smartphone heavyweights are watching their backs this morning after NTP – a company referred to in legal circles as a ‘patent troll’ – launched a barrage of patent infringement lawsuits. Four years ago NTP won a €475 million settlement from BlackBerry makers RIM over a patent breach and now they’re setting their sights on Apple, Google, HTC, Microsoft, Motorola and LG Electronics

NTP has plenty of cash to get a legal team worthy of taking on Apple et al.

They claim that all six companies have infringed upon patents on wireless email technology. If this has an air of familiarity about it, it’s due to the fact that it was the exact same patents that were at the heart of the NTP case against RIM.

As a BBC report noted, there were no comments from any of the firms accused in the lawsuits, which have been filed in a Virginia district court. The Beeb added that after the RIM settlement, which saw the Canadian firm pay out $612.5 million in total, NTP’s patents were re-examined by the US Patent and Trademark Office. Many were thrown out, but NTP’s president Don Stout said three had been upheld. “We hope we can resolve these cases without having to go to trial,” he said.

In a prepared statement Stout added, “The filing of suit today is necessary to ensure that those companies who are infringing NTP’s patents will be required to pay a licensing fee,”

The RIM case ended in 2006, when – in return for the massive settlement – the BlackBerry makers received a license allowing it to use patented NTP technology in all of RIM’s current and future products. A CNN report on the matter also notes that in 2007, NTP sued AT&T, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless for similar infringements. Those cases are still pending.

As CNN points out, there are many critics of US patent policy as companies are allowed to collect patents for inventions they never plan to manufacture. Those companies, often referred to as ‘patent trolls’, can then opportunistically sue alleged infringers.

A Senate bill is in the works to bring changes to the US Patent Office, including a transition to a “first-to-file” system rather than a “first-to-invent” approach. The United States is apparently the only major country that gives patents to those who can prove they invented an item before someone else’s patent was filed.