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BlackBerry Enters New Phase Of Patent Monetization, Sues Internet Telephony Firm Avaya (arstechnica.com)
In what can be seen as a turning point for BlackBerry, the Canadian iconic company has filed a patent lawsuit against internet telephony firm Avaya. BlackBerry claims Avaya has infringed eight of its U.S. patents, and that BlackBerry should be paid for its history of innovation going back nearly 20 years. "BlackBerry revolutionized the mobile industry," the company's lawyers said. "BlackBerry... has invented a broad array of new technologies that cover everything from enhanced security and cryptographic techniques, to mobile device user interfaces, to communication servers, and many other areas." From an article on Iam Media: The move comes just over a year since Blackberry announced itself as a major player in the monetisation space with an agreement signed with Cisco, in which the Canadian company not only secured a cross-licensing deal but also "a license fee from Cisco." Another royalty-bearing deal was done with an unnamed company around the same time. Since then, the company has also signed two more deals with Canon and International Game Technology, both of which look to contain a royalties element to them; while in January it emerged that late last year Blackberry had sold a portfolio of patents to investment firm Centerbridge Partners for as much as $50 million. Blackberry CEO John Chen has made clear that he sees the company's patent assets as a key element in his plans. "We have today about 44,000 patents. The good thing about this is that we also have one of the youngest patent portfolios in the entire industry, so monetization of our patents is an important aspect of our turnaround," he told delegates at a summit in Waterloo, Ontario, last September. He was at it again in May during an earnings call with analysts when he stated: "Many people have wanted to buy the patents... But I'm not really in a patent-selling mode, I'm in a patent licensing mode."
I don't see the difference between any party that owns patents for anything else than defensive purposes.
The sole productive use for patents is trolling.
The iconic Blackberry has now become a patent troll. Sad.
"do not go gently into that goodnight" - Dylan Thomas
RIM is just a dead tech company turned patent troll hoping maybe one day if they have enough money from patent harassment they might get lucky and invent something useful again.
I wish Blackberry would just fold already and go away. It's obviously their only real option and I find this hanging on for no real purpose quite irritating.
To the BB folks: get a job!
Well considering Avaya developed a bunch of their technology in house, owning the patents, and then bought up a huge share of Nortels IP, I'm not sure blackberry has a leg to stand on here, considering they at no point entered the same market that Avaya and Cisco currently operate in. This is 100% related to BBs relationship with Cisco, who loves to live on the edge of patent infringement, going so far as to name their Voip system indentically to Avaya's This is why patents are mostly bullshit and used to stifle innovation and competition. IMO if you aren't actively exploiting the patents you have, you have no right to sue someone who is.
"We have today about 44,000 patents. The good thing about this is that we also have one of the youngest patent portfolios in the entire industry, so monetization of our patents is an important aspect of our turnaround," he told delegates at a summit in Waterloo, Ontario, last September. He was at it again in May during an earnings call with analysts when he stated: "Many people have wanted to buy the patents... But I'm not really in a patent-selling mode, I'm in a patent licensing mode."
Translation: Our company is essentially dead in the water with no capability or desire to continue production and innovation, so instead we are going to start seeking rents for cash flow and cutting staff to increase stock price.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Looks like we have another SCO on our hands.
DIAF BB
Might as well have titled the article: "Blackberry switches focus from premium tech company to major patent troll", or "How to avoid bankruptcy of a society-contributing company by turning it into a society hazard".
"BlackBerry... has invented a broad array of new technologies that cover everything from enhanced security and cryptographic techniques" and don;t forget "will turn your secrets over to the cops at the drop of a hat"
44000 patents in 20 years is 6 patents per day. Fuck you blackberry you're part of the problem.
Given that Blackberry (RIM) got burned for over $600M by a patent troll I'm not surprised they're on the offensive.
RIM shot...i'll be here all week.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
The patents in question, if they are proved valid, have far reaching applications. This will be bigger than the SCO Caldera Unix thing ever was.
So, how does this impact all of us?
First, they've already signed a cross licensing deal with Cisco. Cisco's paying them a license fee as well. What does Cisco get out of it? That last patent is against OpenSSL, specifically on the generation of X.509 certificates and certain cryptographic methods. (How? I thought that business methods weren't patent-able?). So, that includes certificate based VPNs, self-signed HTTPS certificates, and things like that found on the router. Since the method of generation appears to be patented, even work-alike implementations, e.g. LibreSSL, are probably in danger of lawsuits. So, for free, Cisco gets to single-handedly raise the cost of home and small business router appliances, and quite-possibly squeeze some of the smaller ones out of business. Not to mention punishing open firmware router implementations at the same time, such as SmoothWall, DD-WRT, and OpenWRT.
If history serves as any guide, Microsoft will be the next to pony up (Just like they did with SCO Unix). Microsoft would benefit greatly from this agreement. They'll get to squeeze the phone market and the Open Source ecosystem all at the same time. They'll probably cross-license with RIM, and make sure that WinMo is covered. Then they'd go to the phone manufacturers and sell it for less than they'd have to pay RIM for each phone with the infringing OpenSSL bits and Android installed. Google has already shown they've no interest in shielding their partners from patent litigation. RIM and Microsoft will likely start small, with Alcatel and Blu, and work their way up to HTC and Samsung. Similarly, MS will probably ask RIM to provide Linux licenses (which they will pay for their Azure instances), so they can attempt to force Google and Amazon to do the same.
It's not quite the end of the world though. Linux and open source have beaten overly broad patents before. We may be entering a period of long technological stagnation, while we wait to see what happens with all this.
the first sign a company is beginning to fall downward, permanently
Describing Avaya as an "internet telephony firm" is like calling BestBuy a "online commerce giant". Sure, their products recently started working over the internet after the entire industry left their heavy iron in the dust years ago.
A better title might be "dead and buried dinosaur of mobile phones sues dead and buried dinosaur of corporate telephony"
When you are thinking to sympathize to Avaya think again. For example "Avaya tried to monopolize maintenance, jury says in $60M verdict" http://www.pcworld.com/article...
Another dinosaur that refuses to die and tries to wriggle out of the tar pit. Just give him time to struggle and finally croak.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yep - they've become the SCO of mobile devices/phones. It took 10+ years for SCO to finally die - 'wonder how long they'll drag on like this for ?
if anything, BBY owes them everything for creating a variant on a telephone! Avaya was a spinoff of post-divestiture Bell System company Western Electric, and a direct descendant of the first telephone.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
While blackberry phones seem to have neared the end of relevance, QNX is still a hugely popular and profitable market spanning software running beneath all kinds of products.
http://www.qnx.com/content/qnx...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
When can we as a country be rid of the Patent Office? I have honestly never seen a useful patent. Every single one I have ever read has been full of hogwash, obvious second-hand information about useful inventions, put together by people who most likely read academic papers or even news articles, but had little or no experience and technical expertise around the subject. If you had to use a patent as your sole source of information on how to create something, you would be perhaps better off leaving it unread.
To make matters worse, the employees at the Patent Office have to be some of the stupidest people on the planet to continue approving these garbage patents. The place is a trash heap. Get rid of it.
In short, a company that had a stranglehold AND a crotch-grab on the mobile market for YEARS, then pissed it away, devolving into utter irrelevancy after bending and spreading for various governments has now decided that, since they're totally and utterly fucked, they may as well try to give the industry that they gave away a big black eye by patent trolling.
Fuck Blackberry. I can't wait till they go the way of Caldera.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!