Research in Motion has taken another hit during its current downward spiral. A northern California jury has directed RIM to pay $147.2 million in damages over a remote management system for wireless devices, says an attorney for the plaintiff, Mformation Technologies Inc.
Reuters, via MacDailyNews:
The verdict on Friday in a San Francisco federal court comes at a bad time for RIM, whose stock has fallen more than 70 percent in the past year as customers abandon the BlackBerry in favor of Apple’s iPhone and a slew of devices using Google Inc’s Android software.
An attorney for Mformation, Amar Thakur, said the jury directed RIM to pay an $8 royalty for each BlackBerry device connected to RIM’s enterprise server software. The total award comes to $147.2 million. The verdict includes only the U.S., and not future or foreign damages.
RIM could not be reached for comment.
Last month RIM posted its first operating loss in eight years, and it was much worse than expected. The company also reported that it was cutting 5,000 jobs, almost a third of its total workforce.
The Mformation lawsuit was filed against RIM in 2008, claiming RIM was infringing on a patent for a process that remotely manages a wireless device over a wireless network.
RIM argued that the patent claims are invalid, as the processes were already being used when Mformation filed its patent application.
