BlackBerry Messages Facebook Through Court
Facebook may be in court soon. BlackBerry is suing it. The largely-forgotten smartphone pioneer has “claimed in a lawsuit Tuesday that Facebook Inc. and its WhatsApp and Instagram units have infringed its patents and swiped intellectual property from its BlackBerry Messenger technology”, WSJ reports.
In its 117-page court filing in U.S. federal court in Los Angeles, BlackBerry says the defendants “created mobile messaging applications that co-opt BlackBerry’s innovations, using a number of the innovative security, user interface, and functionality enhancing features that made BlackBerry’s products…”.
This is to tell us that there was nothing in your phone that BlackBerry, Nokia and Kodak did not (taken) collectively invent. BlackBerry had invented time-stamps, messaging, tagging of people on photos and practically anything you see on WhatsApp, Instagram, and Pinterest. Kodak invented digial camera which is really the cool thing in smartphones. Nokia had some nice prototypes decorating their designer centers. They all failed at different levels of market benchmarks.
I am not sure BlackBerry would have any luck in the court. The best it could get would be few tens of millions of dollars. Of course, that could add as revenue as it fights for relevance before investors.
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Facebook could even fight to void the patents, extending the pains to BlackBerry. [Facebook shot back: "Having abandoned its efforts to innovate, Blackberry is now looking to tax the innovation of others. We intend to fight."] But it could act nice by sending them money and then release a nice statement that “BlackBerry and Facebook have now entered into cooperative patent licensing agreement to strengthen our businesses”. The lawyers would smile: deal done.
Sometimes you don't go to court because you stand any chance of winning a case, but rather to get something from the party who threatens your existence and sources of livelihood. Once you are able to get their attention and subsequently the all important 'pity', then you are already a winner.
There was a BlackBerry, the once famous 'pinging' smartphone, who lost its way and is still smarting to understand what actually hit it. Nothing lasts forever, not even BlackBerry device!
