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."

Comments

Is it really a "new phase"

[NotInHere]

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.

Re:RIP Blackberry...

[Tablizer]

They are at Stage 7:

1. Rapid Growth
2. Monopolization
3. Monopoly cash-cow cruse-mode
4. Changes make you irrelevant
5. Try to change, but lost competitive edge
6. Milk locked-in customers for every last dime
7. Sue everything and everyone for money
8. Shrink to nothing
9. Borg'ed: get bought out by a conglomerate at a discount

"new phase" aka Patent Armegeddon

[PincushionMan]

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.

• The patents include: [web-copy-pasted From Ars article above]
• Nos. 9,143,801 and 8,964,849, relating to "significance maps" for coding video data;
• No. 8,116,739, describing methods of displaying messages;
• No. 8,886,212, describing tracking location of mobile devices;
• No. 8,688,439, relating to speech decoding and compression;
• No.7,440,561, describing integrating wireless phones into a PBX network;
• No. 8,554,218, describing call routing methods; and
• No. 7,372,961, a method of generating a cryptographicpublic key.

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.

Re:"new phase" aka Patent Armegeddon

[TechyImmigrant]

> specifically on the generation of X.509 certificates and certain cryptographic methods.

This one describes a procedure that sounds different to the usual way but is in fact the same.
You want a random number for a key in a field of order q, q is a prime, so say a 256 bit prime is a prime that fits into 256 bits, but there are 256 bit numbers bigger than q which aren't in the field since 2^256 -1 is not prime. q is not as big as the biggest number you can represent in 256 bits.

So the obvious thing to is: Repeat { get random number x} until (Hash(x) 2^256); key = H(x);
The patent says, let's not get a new random number in the loop (RNG's being slow and all). We'll make some more by incrementing x until Hash(x) 2^256.
I.E. get random number x; Repeat {x++} until (Hash(x) 2^256); key = H(x);

However the x++; output H(x) is a pretty normal PRNG structure. An RNG typically contains an entropy source to seed a PRNG which then interates a counter and hashes or encrypts the counter, to extend the single seed to many random numbers.

So the patented solution is no different to the normal procedure, pulling from an RNG that contains a PRNG, like for example, a standard SP800-90 RNG or an X9.82 RNG or any of the other relevant standards.

CTR mode has been around a long time. So has the hash version.

Putting this type of patent into the ring in a court fight risks someone putting in the effort to find prior art and invalidating it. It's much easier to license it and get money without a court fight and risking losing the patent.

Re:RIP Blackberry...

[speedplane]

The iconic Blackberry has now become a patent troll. Sad.

They're a real company, with real patents, and sued someone in their industry who is infringing. Why is that a troll? How is that not just proper use of the patent system?