Facebook sues BlackBerry against the theft of voicemail technology

Facebook now seems to have gone on the offensive in a patent dispute between the social media giant and BlackBerry, which filed its own complaint, alleging that six of its patents had been stolen by the smartphone company. Among these, Facebook asserted that a company-invented voicemail technology had been used by BlackBerry without permission, as well as a method for improving the delivery of audio, video and video data. images on mobile devices. The social media company accuses BlackBerry of stealing a technology focused on both tracking and analyzing GPS data. Currently, Facebook has not committed to paying a specific amount of damages if it is a successful action. The case is currently pending with the US District Court of Northern District of California under file number 3: 18-cv-05434.

This case follows another ongoing dispute between the two companies, filed with the US District Court of California Central District in March under file number 2: 18-cv-01844. In this particular case, BlackBerry has accused Facebook and its affiliates of violating its patents associated with mobile messaging. These patents included messaging-related features such as message timestamps and notification badges. Facebook, for its part, initially reacted by accusing the patent tracing company of patents so as to compensate for the lack of internal innovation. Meanwhile, at least one of BlackBerry's patents related to his own case against Facebook has since been invalidated. In particular, the company's mailing timestamp patent was directly challenged by Google recently and dismissed after the Court's First Instance and Appeal Board (PTAB) ruled that the UI element in question was unpatentable.

For the moment, none of these previous BlackBerry files should be brought to court before at least 2020 and the remaining patents for the previous case have not been processed. The same can be said of another patent file filed by BlackBerry against Nokia, which alleges that the company has used network technologies also patented by BlackBerry. We can therefore expect a similar delay for Facebook's new complaint against the company.