Quinn Emanuel, BlackBerry Take On Facebook Over Messaging
BlackBerry Ltd., which no longer makes its own mobile phones, still holds a trove of mobile technology patents, and on Tuesday it unleashed them against the CrackBerry of the current decade: Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
March 07, 2018 at 05:47 PM
3 minute read
Thirteen years ago, owners of BlackBerry mobile devices were holding their collective breath. A nonpracticing entity called NTP Inc. had won a patent infringement suit over wireless email technology, and was pursuing an injunction to shut down the devices so popular then that they were known as “CrackBerry.”
Today, BlackBerry Ltd. no longer makes its own mobile phones—it outsources design to TCL Communications and others. But the company still holds a trove of mobile technology patents, and on Tuesday it unleashed them against the CrackBerry of the current decade: Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Backed by a Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan team, BlackBerry's 117-page complaint takes aim at Facebook's messaging technology. It dismisses Facebook and its subsidiaries as “relative latecomers to the mobile messaging world” who've chosen to “co-opt BlackBerry's innovations.”
Specifically, BlackBerry accuses Menlo Park-based Facebook of infringing seven patents on cryptographic techniques for maintaining message security; user interface improvements in the areas of notifications, time stamps and tagging; the combining of mobile messaging with mobile gaming; and battery efficiency.
What kinds of damages might be in play? The complaint, signed by Quinn Emanuel partner James Asperger and filed in Los Angeles federal court, doesn't say. But it does note that “the importance of mobile messaging is emphasized by the reported $19 billion Facebook spent to acquire WhatsApp.”
BlackBerry v. Facebook also seeks to enjoin Facebook from “making, using, selling, and offering for sale the Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Facebook Messenger Lite, Facebook Workplace Chat, Facebook Pages Manager, WhatsApp Messenger, and Instagram applications and websites.” Injunctions, though, are much harder to get now in patent suits than they were in 2005.
Facebook has used the Supreme Court's Alice decision on patent eligibility to defeat a lot of similar lawsuits at an early stage. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit recently held that Alice motions can involve fact issues that must be decided by juries. On cue, BlackBerry's complaint includes detailed allegations that the inventions described in the seven patents are not “well-understood, routine or conventional.”
Facebook Deputy General Counsel Paul Grewal said in a statement that Facebook intends to fight. “Blackberry's suit sadly reflects the current state of its messaging business,” he said. “Having abandoned its efforts to innovate, Blackberry is now looking to tax the innovation of others.”
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