Big companies tech companies like Research in Motion seem to constantly find themselves fighting a never ending wave of patent infringement law suites, often times frivolous claims that don’t really have a chance to win at trial. The problem is that these companies, even if it is almost a certainty that they will successfully defend themselves, have to incur the expense of doing so, and, it is often easier to ‘join em” as it is simply too expensive to ‘beat em‘ all…
This is exactly what Research in Motion has done when they signed a deal with patent holding firm Intellectual Ventures as they now have access to their over 30,000 patents.
Intellectual Ventures offers an efficient way to access the invention rights companies need to stay competitive within the market,” Mario Obeidat, the patent company’s head of telecom licensing, said on Wednesday in a statement.
Terms of the deals have not be released, but, we would have to bet the the price RIM paid was a lot less than having to deal with thousands of potential lawsuits individually.
[Read]
The United States needs to do a lot of work to combat the problem of patent trolling, which big companies are just as guilty of as the little patent holding companies, but, we will leave that for a different post…
Kik Interactive, the company behind the popular cross platform mobile instant messaging client, Kik Messenger, has filed a statement of defence and a counterclaim against Research in Motion who filed a patent infringement suit against Kik Interactive back in December of 2010, after first removing Kik Messenger from BlackBerry App World and disabling push notifications to the app.
RIM claims that Kik Interactive CEO, Ted Livingstone, while working at Research in Motion, gained access to sensitive data regarding BlackBerry Messenger and used this knowledge in during the creation of Kik Messenger. RIM actually sued Kik Interactive alleging breach of confidentiality, trademark infringement, and patent infringement.
In Kik’s statement (available here, 7MB PDF), the company “denies that it was developing a cross-platform instant messaging client in secret or had access to RIM’s BBM confidential documents, denies that it’s infringing on RIM’s trademarks or patents, and found prior art (EP093213, JP10013881, Outlook 2000, and a whole list of documents in Schedules A & B) which Kik alleges makes RIM’s asserted patents invalid.”
To make a long story short, Kik says that RIM, who initially supported Kik Messenger, saw it’s overnight success as a threat to BlackBerry Messenger causing “senior executives at RIM to embark on a campaign to destroy or seriously harm Kik, including unilaterally terminating the various agreements between Kik and RIM, suspending and then removing Kik Messenger from BlackBerry App World and commencing this lawsuit, including a meritless patent infringement claim which RIM knew had no realistic chance of success.”
As David Lam theorizes, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle…
[Via David Lam Law Blog]
I don’t think that it comes a big shocker that, after removing Kik Messenger from BlackBerry App World followed by suspending Kik Messenger push messages to existing BlackBerry Kik Messenger users and throwing terms like “breached contractual obligations” around, Research in Motion has filed a patent infringement law suit against Kik Interactive Inc., the company behind Kick Messenger.
I think that it is a pretty safe bet that Kik Messenger will never again be supported on the BlackBerry platform. This lawsuit, however, brings into question the future of Kick Messenger on other platforms. Details on which patents RIM believes Kik has infringed on aren’t yet available but something tells me that that Kik Messenger’s “sent,” “delivered,” and “read” flags are a big part of the problem.
Will we see a cease and desist next for all Kik services? I think that chances are good…
Mformation Technologies, a New Jersey based handset management software company, said Friday that they have sued Research in Motion for patent infringement. The firm claims that RIM has infringed upon two patents related to “remote device management”.
“After refusing to license Mformation’s disclosed systems and software, RIM modified its BlackBerry software to include Mformation’s patented systems and methods of remote management,” Mformation said.
Mformation has not yet specified what remidies it is seeking.
[Reuters]
(sarcasm)We know that last company that you would ever expect to be involved in a patent infringement lawsuit would be Research in Motion(/sarcasm), however, that is exactly what the BlackBerry maker is wrapped up in with Motorola.
Motorola is claiming that the way most BlackBerry 8xxx series devices store contact info in wireless emails and the ability to recognize incoming phone numbers infringes on their patents.
In a clever legal move often referred to as the “Whatever you can do we can also do“, RIM has filed their own claim against Motorola stating that the thumb keyboard is awfully similar to those found on BlackBerrys.