BlackBerry Sues Twitter For Patent Infringement (reuters.com)

BlackBerry has set its sights on Twitter in a new patent infringement lawsuit, accusing the social media company of illegally using technology in its mobile messaging apps that had been developed by the former smartphone maker. Reuters reports: The lawsuit said Twitter wrongly sought to compensate for being a "relative latecomer" to mobile messaging by co-opting Blackberry's inventions for such services as the main Twitter application and Twitter Ads, infringing six of the company's patents. Twitter "succeeded in diverting consumers away from BlackBerry's products and services" and toward its own by misappropriating features that made BlackBerry "a critical and commercial success in the first place," the complaint said.

The lawsuit resembles patent infringement cases that BlackBerry filed there last March and April against Facebook and Snap. Last August, U.S. District Judge George Wu allowed BlackBerry to pursue most of its infringement claims in those lawsuits, which according to court records remain pending. Wu may be assigned the case against San Francisco-based Twitter because federal courts often assign cases deemed "related" to a single judge. The Facebook and Snap lawsuits were deemed related.

Comments

Re:Sad world

[mysidia]

Patent, not copyright.
      And Blackberry does not meet the typical definition of troll -- Blackberry was a practicing entity that was there first and patented some of the methods they were using, but they were then out-innovated by more software-heavy companies like Apple and Google...
Twitter is not something Blackberry would have developed, because BB saw itself as a phone maker, at least until very recently.

Anyways, they're not a "troll" per se, but in their desperate condition BB needs to maximize revenue from every source possible, so they turn to licensing their patent portfolio.

"Troll" implies Blackberry is at fault, But in fact --- it is OUR patent system at fault: if companies like Blackberry are being allowed to hold patents on software system or feature designs that are broad or so obvious that its something any skilled developer would come up with when faced with a challenge, rather than only patentable substantial developments that significantly add to the state of the art.

Re:Sad world

[gl4ss]

at this point blackberry is a patent troll quite typically. as this is a quite typical path to being a patent troll - maximizing revenue from every source possible is kinda the usual reason, when the method is riskily suing big money victims.

it was a really hubris company that got into a market by sidestepping standards and providing a service that was doable with standard networks just a few years after and really they didn't have anything really special about it even. their thing was hacking their push email system into place just _before_ data networks made it unnecessary to hack such a system in place.

I'm just surprised they didn't sue google for android along with sun since their earlier os had quite a bit in common with android being java and all - the reason is easily guessable though, since they tried making android based phones themselves.

and fwiw they failed because they couldn't compete on price on open market. their key markets were _only_ operator subsidized markets and their devices were _actually_ hideously expensive for what they were. same for palm. made a lot of money for a short while though, but they thought they were just so special and good, when they just had a good deal going for a short while of price gouging markets where the price of the device was hidden in a 100 bucks per month fee of using the mobile service(of which 80 bucks was paying for the "free" phone and as there was no way to _not_ be paying for a "free" phone people went along with it).