BlackBerry maker put on patent defensive again
Company will face court challenge from mobile email company Visto over several patents.
May 1, 2006: 6:37 PM EDT

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) - BlackBerry maker Research in Motion will face a patent lawsuit from mobile email company Visto seeking an injunction and monetary damages, according to Visto.

RIM just inked a $612 million settlement in March with NTP over a long-running patent dispute which could have shut down its BlackBerry email service.

Visto filed the suit immediately after a victory in a patent case in Texas federal court over mobile email service provider Seven Networks.

"Friday's sweeping decision against Seven Networks validates our claims that Visto's intellectual property serves as the basis for this industry's birth," said Brian Bogosian, Visto's CEO, in a statement.

"We believe that RIM's infringement of Visto's technology will be halted. Our case against RIM is based on similar technology, law and patents as the case we have just won in federal court against Seven Networks."

RIM said in a statement that its technology was a different type of system than Seven's, and that it believed the patent claims would not hold. It said that it does not expect its customers to be impacted by the complaint, and that court proceedings would likely not begin before mid-2007.

Visto was started in 1996 to allow computer users to access sensitive data behind corporate firewalls. The company provides an email service for cellular devices that's used by mobile carriers like Cingular, Sprint Nextel (Research) and Vodafone (Research).

Three of the patents in the Seven case are the same as in Visto's suit against RIM.

Shares in RIM (Research) fell 4.3 percent on the Nasdaq late Monday.

that's bogus, this crap has to stop, push email shouldn't be patentable

it says this lawsuit has been started after winning a local court case.. it didnt mention the fact it started after it saw how much money was going to NTP

/rolleyes

Why not? it is a massive improvement in the delivery system and was (at the time) fairly novel. the fact that it has become ubiquitous since RIM first launched BlackBerry *almost a decade ago* does not mean that it wasn't a good and patentable idea at the time.
What is a better question to ask is, should the patent system be revised to reduce the length of a valid patent?

Those darn patents...