Wants to stop all sales of Blackberry in the USA
Mobile email software provider Visto has won a jury verdict in a Texas court against rival Seven, which it accused of deliberately misappropriating Visto technology. The company responded to the victory by immediately filing claims based on the same technology against RIM. Visto wants a jury trial in the same court, and its aim is to stop RIM selling Blackberry devices in the United States.
The jury in the federal court for the Eastern District of Texas said Seven was guilty of willfully infringing five claims relating to three patents. Applying a royalty rate of 19.75% to revenues made from products which include the infringing technology, the jury awarded Visto $3.6 million.
Speaking to press in a conference call, ceo Brian Bogosian said he expected a further hearing to establish whether Seven should be prohibited from using its system. But a Seven statement said that as yet its customers would not be affected, and Seven would continue to operate its system unhindered. Perhaps anticipating that things may change, the company said that in any case a software workaround would be in place soon that would make a move to prohibit further use irrelevant. Bogosian countered that he considered the affected claims to run so deep in Seven’s system as to make a workaround virtually impossible.
Although Bogosian said the victory was as “overwhelming a victory as you could ever get in an IP dispute”, and said the court had “validated every claim made by Visto”, Seven said that in fact Visto had won rulings on only five of an original 200 claims, and on only three of an original six patents. It also said that two of the patents on which the court ruled in Visto’s favour are in re-examination at the US patents office (PTO), and are looking likely to be rejected. Bogosian responded that Visto has had a crucial patent pass re-examination before, and expected these patents to come through as well.
Whatever the clarity and scale of this decision, Visto has felt emboldened enough to go after RIM. RIM has only recently settled with NTP which now has a minority stake in, and has licensed technology to,Visto.
Bogosian said the company was not after royalties or damages (yet) from RIM. It simply wants the company to stop its devices in the US. Asked why now was a good time
Readers should be aware that motions to stop use and sales refer only to the US, although RIM’s business would be clearly affected by any such success on Visto’s part. Bogosian said his operator customers (of which Vodafone is one) understood Visto’s approach to defending its position in the market, and were not unsettled by having a potential source of revenue — sales and support of Blackberry devices — denied to them.
RIM reacted by saying it does not think it violates any Visto patents, nor does it think the patents referred to in the Seven case are relevant to its own system. It said it may also file a counter claim against Visto to assert its own patents. Seven is currently also counter-filing against Visto.
Visto is currently in dispute with Microsoft, Good Technology, , Sproqit, RIM and Seven. But Bogosian denied the company had become merely a legal machine. “We have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, 400 employees in 10 countries and major operator customers. Frankly we have no choice to defend our innovation.”