BlackBerry wins one legal skirmish
Thank God for small favors: The popular e-mail device may be on the verge of losing its patent battle in the U.S., but it has one a small victory in Germany, and will likely win another one in England
BlackBerry is facing shutdown in the United States as a result of a bitter patent infringement legal action taken against it by Arlington, Virginia-based NTP. About 75 percent of BlackBerry’s 4.3 million users live and work in the United States, so this is the main arena. In Europe, however, the Canadian PDA maker Research in Motion (RIM) has just won a small battle when a Munich court this week invalidated a patent held by Luxembourg- based Inpro Licensing Sarl, which Inpro claimed was related to the relay of data between BlackBerry devices and the Internet. There is another European battle for RIM as the High Court in London is scheduled to rule on the validity of the U.K. version of the same patent later this week. If the London court decides in favor of RIM, BlackBerry’s 375,000 U.K. subscribers will be protected from service interruption.
-read more in this news release
