BlackBerry deals another blow to Seacrest’s copycat keyboard empire

Score another win for BlackBerry’s legal team. The Wall Street Journal reportsthat U.S. District Judge William Orrick last week upheld the preliminary injunction that he granted earlier this year that effectively barred Ryan Seacrest’s company Typo from selling its iPhone keyboard attachments in the United States because they allegedly infringed upon BlackBerry’s design patents.

In his original ruling, Orrick said that BlackBerry’s legal team had established a clear “likelihood” that Typo infringed upon BlackBerry’s patents while Typo’s legal team didn’t knock down any of the key patents in suit. In his new ruling last week, Orrick said that “BlackBerry has raised significant questions suggesting that Typo’s sales to foreign retailers after the injunction went into effect…violated the preliminary injunction.”

In its argument before the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California earlier this year BlackBerry claimed that the original Typo’s “blatant copying of BlackBerry’s keyboard presents an imminent threat of irreparable harm to BlackBerry, and that threat is magnified in combination with the significant market power of the iPhone.”

Typo earlier this summer came out with a brand-new keyboard attachment called the Typo 2 that seems to be slightly less derivative of BlackBerry’s keyboards than the original Typo but that will likely also spawn a lawsuit from the company.

SOURCE:

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL