Research In Motion Ltd. has concluded one of its legal disputes with Visto Corp., but the war of patent lawsuits between the two companies continues elsewhere.
Visto has agreed to pay damages to RIM after a Federal Court judge found that the Redwood City, Calif., company infringed on three of the BlackBerry maker's Canadian patents. That ruling came after the two companies had reached their own agreement on other aspects of the case.
RIM filed the lawsuit during the summer of 2006, claiming that Visto's technology infringed on its patents for transferring data between servers and mobile devices.
About two weeks before the trial was to begin on May 12, the two sides agreed to end the case. Visto said it would drop its inequitable conduct and antitrust claims regarding RIM's behaviour, while the Waterloo, Ont., company dropped its requests for punitive damages and an injunction to ban the sale of Visto's mobile e-mail software in Canada.
Once the two sides took those claims off the table, all that was left was a damages claim from RIM relating to three cases of alleged patent infringement. Although Visto did not admit to infringing RIM's patents, it agreed not to contest the allegations, according to Tim Gilbert, a Toronto lawyer representing Visto in the suit.
As a result, Federal Court Judge Roger Hughes ruled on May 21 that Visto infringed on RIM's patents and ordered Visto to pay damages.
Lawyers for the two sides had been trying to "wind the case down" for about six weeks, Visto general counsel Tim Robbins said. "The outside lawyers reached an agreement on a number of issues to narrow the case and then Visto made what we believe is a good business decision based on the narrowed case and the lack of relevance on the remaining issues to just call it a day."
The two companies still need to work out a payment plan for damages, but Mr. Robbins said the amount would be "trivial" compared with what the company was paying in legal costs.
"Quite frankly the legal expenses we were being forced to incur with this case far exceeded any damages," he said. "In our opinion this case has never made any sense because they [RIM] were only accusing us of infringing with a small subset of our products and we already have upgrades planned."
