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posted by n1 on Saturday August 06 2016, @02:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the if-all-else-fails,-get-the-lawyers dept.

BlackBerry has filed a patent lawsuit (PDF) against Internet telephony firm Avaya. The dispute marks a turning point for Blackberry, which pushed into the Android market last year but has been struggling.

In making its case that Avaya should pay royalties, BlackBerry's focus is squarely on its rear-view mirror. The firm argues that it should be paid for its history of innovation going back nearly 20 years.

"BlackBerry revolutionized the mobile industry," the company's lawyers wrote in their complaint. "BlackBerry... has invented a broad array of new technologies that cover everything from enhanced security and cryptographic techniques, to mobile device user interfaces, to communication servers, and many other areas."

Out of a vast portfolio, BlackBerry claims Avaya infringes eight US Patents:

The patents have various original filing dates, ranging from 2011 back to 1998.

Accused products include Avaya's video conferencing systems, Avaya Communicator for iPad, a product that connects mobile users to IP Office systems, and various IP desk phones. The '961 cryptography patent is allegedly infringed by a whole series of products that "include OpenSSL and Open SSL elliptic curve cryptography," including the Avaya CMS and conferencing systems.

[...] A patent cross-license that BlackBerry executed last year involved Cisco paying a "license fee," although the amount was confidential. In May, BlackBerry CEO John Chen told investors on an earnings call that he was in "patent licensing mode," eager to monetize his company's 38,000 patents.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Hyperturtle on Saturday August 06 2016, @09:26PM

    by Hyperturtle (2824) on Saturday August 06 2016, @09:26PM (#384834)

    I don't suppose it's any better -- but it isn't any worse, and it was inexpensive.

    I've thought about getting some pretty basic phones that receive SMS and can make calls, but I generally have come to depend on the email availability -- for mostly personal life (work stuff is seperate as needed).

    There are $50 devices out there that are not blackberry and are smartphones; I had really wanted to try the last Palms that came out. I have had no intention of giving into the Google singularity, although I occasionally use some outdated tablets to get around on the internet without having signed into anything (and those things try to rat me out anyway via sending all my DNS queries to google servers... had to block that at the network edge. They didn't give the OS out for free because of altruism! I'd run something else on the hardware if it was worth the time to do).

    I actually also have an old iPaq I won from Microsoft many years ago, and use it for nethack and some bluetooth stuff -- it has too weak of a processor to do as you stated as you do with your iphone; a sip handset... but it almost was good enough. I could hear but it couldn't encode well...

    Instead, since its utility is now pretty limited, I use it to play Nethack, and it can do this really well... When bored, I sometimes dig it out, as I've come to prefer that version than the PC version.

    I have tried Nethack on my android tablets, and even bought a stylus that lets me have finer control over the game... but it still seems wonky on Android compared to the ipaq version.

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