BlackBerry has now laid to rest what is possibly one of their longest legal battles. Back in 2008, Mformation sued at the time RIM, for violation of remote device management patents held by Mformation Technologies on BlackBerry smartphones asking for $8 for each of the accounted 18.4M BlackBerry smartphones sold for a grand total of $147.2M.
Initially, Mformation won. That was overturned and BlackBerry appealed and then they won and as we noted back in August of 2012, Mformation decided once again to appeal the verdict holding it over for many years. That all came to a close on Friday though as Judge Edward M. Chen's ruling found that "substantial evidence" did not support a judgment of infringement. Speaking on the matter in an email to the Financial Post, A spokeswoman for BlackBerry noted.
[Friday's] verdict follows a series of successful litigation victories, underscoring BlackBerry's continued effort to fight against meritless claims. We look forward to a time when technology companies will no longer be forced to spend huge amounts of time and money defending frivolous patent cases such as these, and instead invest their resources to drive innovation.
That's a lot of years to be arguing in court so it's nice to see it finally laid to rest and with BlackBerry coming out on top. That's $147.2M saved that can be better spent elsewhere.
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