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BlackBerry Injunction Could Take Effect as Soon as Next Week

7:30 am on February 25, 2006 | Category: Business, Law, Mobile Devices

Another short delay in the BlackBerry patent infringement lawsuit has caused RIM shareholders to breath a sign of relief, albeit a very temporary one.

Virginia judge, James Spencer, said that there is no getting around the fact that a jury found RIM guilty of infringing on NTPâ€™s wireless email patents, but that he wonâ€™t be making a final decision on an injunction against the BlackBerry device until sometime next week.

The motivation behind this move could quite possibly be to give the two companies one last chance to come to a settlement before bringing into effect an order to shut down RIMâ€™s popular BlackBerry push email service in the United States.

If the companies again fail to settle, RIM will likely be given at least a few days to implement its workaround technology, which they claim would circumvent NTPâ€™s patents.

Although having the workaround technology in reserve is a nice fallback for the Ontario-based company, using it will almost certainly end up being a big hassle for customers. Each and every existing BlackBerry customer would be forced to install new software on their devices, which may cause some of them to defect to any of a number of recently launched alternatives.

When it comes down to it, most analysts still say that RIM would be better off to give up its stubbornness and seek a financial settlement, rather than rely on such a risky fallback strategy.

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