BlackBerry sues Facebook for patent infringement

BlackBerry today, filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles accusing social media giant Facebook and its WhatsApp and Instagram apps, of patent infringement. According to the suit, the trio stole features and technology from BlackBerry Messenger. The suit comes after both companies spent "several years in dialogue," according to a BlackBerry spokeswoman by the name of Sarah McKinney.

Facebook Deputy General Counsel Paul Grewal says that the company plans on fighting. Grewal lamented what he called the current state of BlackBerry's messaging business, and added that "having abandoned its efforts to innovate, Blackberry is now looking to tax the innovation of others." The one-time smartphone market leader says that it is trying to collect royalties from companies that need to use BlackBerry's huge collection of 40,000 global patents covering operating systems, networking infrastructure, acoustics, messaging, automotive subsystems, cybersecurity and wireless communications.


Last year Qualcomm paid BlackBerry $940 million after an arbitration panel confirmed that the chip designer owed BlackBerry the money to resolve a battle over royalties. A few months later, BlackBerry collected an undisclosed amount from Florida's Blu Products Inc. in another patent infringement case. And John Chen and crew are still awaiting the outcome of a suit BlackBerry filed in Delaware against Nokia in February 2017, related to Nokia's use of 3G and 4G wireless communication technologies on some of its devices. 

source: Reuters