That title should be sung to the tune of ‘On The Road Again‘.
RIM’s been sued for patent infringement by Visto, who claims that RIM is wrongly using four of Visto’s patents in its BlackBerry system. On the surface this seems different from the NTP suit RIM settled in March: Visto and RIM compete in the market where NTP is a patent holding company, the patents at issue in this case apply to different areas of the service and RIM is far from Visto’s first infringement target.
Visto has been in the wireless email business for several years and has about 200K users on several cellular carriers’ networks. The patents, according to Visto’s co-founder, cover data synchronization and other functions, rather than network elements as in the NTP case. And Visto last week won a suit against Seven Networks for infringing three of the four patents its accusing RIM of infringing. (Seven, taking a page from RIM’s legal notebook, has not only appealed but also asked the US PTO to review Visto’s patents.)
Visto has also sued Good Technology as well as Microsoft. Oh, did I mention that Visto has licensed NTP’s patents and that NTP is a stockholder in Visto?
[Update] RIM has countersued.