Less than a month after being ordered to pay $147 million in damages over a patent claim, Research in Motion has won a ruling that it did not infringe on that patent after all and won't have to pay a dime.

Mobile device management company Mformation sued RIM alleging violation of a patent describing a "system and method for remote control and management of wireless devices," winning a unanimous jury verdict in San Francisco that RIM was liable for infringement. The $147 million figure was based on royalties of past sales to nongovernment customers in the US. An Mformation attorney said that figure could double or triple if Mformation sought royalties on future sales from government customers and from outside the US.

But RIM asked the court to reverse the decision, and US District Chief Judge James Ware obliged. Ware ruled yesterday (Scribd link) as a matter of law that Mformation failed to establish that RIM infringes its patent. The evidence "shows that RIM's accused products do not practice the '917 patent. Thus, the court finds that there was no 'legally sufficient evidentiary basis' on which a reasonable jury could have found for Mformation on the issue of infringement."

According to an announcement by RIM, "Mformation has the right to appeal the Judge's ruling; however if Mformation successfully appeals the ruling, the jury verdict would not be reinstated and instead a new trial would occur." That's because Ware conditionally granted RIM's motion for a new trial, but that new trial would not occur unless Mformation somehow reverses this latest ruling.

The decision hinged on Claim #1 in patent #6,970,917, which "recites a process in which a command is placed in a mailbox at a server and in which the command is delivered to a wireless device," the ruling notes. Judge Ware ruled that BlackBerry products do not infringe this because of the way in which BlackBerry Enterprise Server communicates with devices. Here's the key part of the ruling: