Blackberry Ltd. talked about Friday it had filed a swimsuit in a California court docket in opposition to Los Angeles agency Typo merchandise for violating its patents with a Blackberry-like keyboard made for Apple’s iPhone.
The struggling Canadian maker of the Blackberry smartphone stated that Typo’s $ninety nine keyboard case, which attaches a Blackberry-like bodily keyboard to an iPhone 5, “blatantly copied BlackBerry’s keyboard.”
“This is a blatant infringement towards BlackBerry’s iconic keyboard, and we can vigorously give protection to our mental property towards any agency that makes an attempt to reproduction our distinctive design,” mentioned Blackberry’s chief criminal officer Steve Zipperstein.
“We are flattered by way of the usage of the will to graft our keyboard onto different smartphones, on the other hand we can no longer tolerate such task with out sincere compensation for the utilization of our mental property and our technological enhancements,” he mentioned in a observation.
Typo was once created with the aid of media entrepreneur Laurence Hallier and exhibit-biz character Ryan Seacrest, collectively with inventor-designers Ryan Hyde and Jonathan Goodrich.
The company’s site on-line mentioned it’s taking pre-orders for the Typo keyboard case, with the merchandise to be shipped this month.
Blackberry is looking for to flip spherical its fortunes after shedding a management location inside the cell telephone and smartphone change.
In December it stated an tremendous $four.four billion loss in its 1/3 quarter, 4 events the earlier quarter’s loss, as its smartphone gross gross sales slumped via 1/2.
The firm introduced final month that Taiwan-based totally Hon Hai/Foxconn whose China factories produce merchandise for Apple will make stronger and manufacture a quantity of new devices and lend a hand take care of stock for Blackberry.
