Following more than a year of litigation, BlackBerry and Flordia-based Android manufacturer Blu have entered into a patent licensing agreement.
The deal’s financial terms were not disclosed by either company. However, BlackBerry said the deal includes on-going payments from, in an October 12th, 2017 media release.
“We are very pleased to have reached this patent license agreement with BLU Products,” said Jerald Gnuschke, senior director of intellectual property licensing at BlackBerry, in the same release. “The consummation of this agreement enables us to focus on further licensing opportunities in the mobile communications market.”
BlackBerry launched its lawsuit against Blu back in August 2016. The Waterloo-based company alleged Blu infringed upon several of its patent related to cellular connectivity and smartphone user interface elements.
At the time of the original suit, BlackBerry CEO John Chen was adamant that he would use patent litigation as a way to boost his company’s bottom line, saying, “We have today about 44,000 patents. The good thing about this is that we also have one of the youngest patent portfolios in the entire industry, so monetization of our patents is an important aspect of our turnaround.”
Chen later added, during one of the company’s fiscal 2017 earnings calls, “Many people have wanted to buy the patents … But I’m not really in a patent-selling mode, I’m in a patent licensing mode.”
The company also recently won an arbitration case against Qualcomm in which it was awarded more than $940 million USD.
[source]BlackBerry[/source]
