Blackberry continues to take steps to stop being the company it was. If a month ago we told you that the company would stop supporting smartphones equipped with BlackBerry OS, today the news is that the company has decided to get rid of its patents related to the world of mobile telephony, including those of its once popular system instant messaging.
As the Canadian multinational has communicated, it has been Catapult IP Innovations a new company, which has paid 600 million dollars to gain control of these patents.
As read in the press release, Catapult’s financing to take control of the new assets, coming from a loan of 450 million dollars that will be delivered immediately to BlackBerry, while the remaining 150 million dollars corresponds to a I will pay due in three years.
Catapult is therefore a company born with enormous debt. Given that you have neither products nor cash flow, you need to have a plan in place so you can start monetizing BlackBerry patents almost immediately. And what can be translated into this immediate monetization? Probably following the “best practices” of patent trolls, start suing those companies you think are using your newly acquired intellectual property without permission.
Among these would be those related to the use of BBM and QWERTY keyboards, with their own ideas such as silencing a message thread or displaying notifications as a numerical icon on the application that notifies. BlackBerry itself has used them to sue some technology companies, as was the case with Facebook in 2018, or Handspring and Good Technology in the early 2000s.
