Following a US District Judge in San Francisco ordering Typo to pay BlackBerry $860,000, the Ryan Seacrest-backed company now faces another suit from the Canadian smartphone maker for continuing to sell its iPhone case with an integrated hardware keyboard.
The Hollywood Reporter says that BlackBerry has filed a new complaint against Typo in California this week claiming the company’s latest products “slavishly copied…down to the smallest detail, including the layout of the keyboard itself, the shapes of the keys, and the surface sculpting of the keys.”
When news of the previous ruling broke, Typo said it would continue selling its latest keyboard case products and that any lawsuits with BlackBerry do not relate to the design of its latest generation of Typo 2 products. Not so fast, says BlackBerry, with the new complaint specifically targeting the second generation product line:
“Just as they did with the Typo Keyboard, Defendants have again copied numerous proprietary BlackBerry designs and patents in the Typo2 Keyboard,” states the complaint. “The Typo2 Keyboard still blatantly copies BlackBerry’s iconic keyboard trade dress designs that have been embodied in numerous BlackBerry smartphones from the 2007 BlackBerry 8800 to the current Q10 and Classic models. The Typo2 Keyboard also infringes numerous BlackBerry utility patents related to BlackBerry’s proprietary keyboard design, backlighting and typing automation technologies.”
More on the lawsuit at The Hollywood Reporter.
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One really needs to commemorate RiM nee, BlackBerry for their persistence in this matter. Or any matter, for that matter.
Blackberry is getting extremely desperate.
Black keys, white letters, qwerty format… yep, it’s a copy.
Oh, come on, there were many several PDA phones in the past that had same layout as Blackberry such as my old Hitachi G1000 and T-Mobile Sidekicks. Why is Blackberry only targeting Typo keyboard and not others?
because now it’s the absolute only thing Blackberry has to hang its hat on.
Because Blackberry has been redundant for a long while now and is desperately holding onto the only thing it has left, which is what it believes to be some sort of sustaining image.
Not so. Back in the days of Windows Mobile BB sued Samsung not only for keyboard layout but the name of their device ‘Black Jack’ and won resulting in a name change to simply ‘Jack’. And I believe Palm also got sued for keyboard shortly there after. But as usual it also depends on how popular a copied product will be or is.
Such a BS lawsuit. A keyboard is a keyboard, if Blackberry can sue this guy over the keyboard, then Apple should sue HP, DELL and others that have a similar looking keyboard to their MacBookPro/Air keyboards.
What a stupid lawsuit. It’s not even the same layout. The only thing that’s similar is that it’s a black keyboard and it’s used on a smartphone, but there were other smartphones that had keyboards, and they didn’t get sued. What a dumb lawsuit.
now we now what BB business strategy is. they want to be afloat by suing others