After a complaint from BlackBerry, Typo has been ordered to pay damages for ignoring court orders
BlackBerry has won damages from Typo, which has been ordered by the court to pay $860,000 for breaching a ruling that ordered a hold on sales of its original iPhone keyboard case. According to the court statement, Typo has sold approximately 19,000 of the keyboards since the preliminary injunction, reports Reuters.
Typo ignored court orders, BlackBerry complained
The ruling came after Blackberry complained to the court that Typo is still selling and marketing the original Typo case despite the court’s order, which was issued in March of last year and called for a ban on sales.
The Canadian smartphone maker has asked for $2.6 million in sanctions plus attorney’s fees, suggesting that Typo made at least two bulk sales and performed a hundred warranty replacements after sales were barred.
The judge agreed that it is not known how much Blackberry was affected by Typo’s sales but accepted that Typo’s not-so-clever attempts to breach the court’s order reflected the company’s intentions. U.S. District Judge William Orrick in San Francisco ordered Typo to pay only one-third of what was demanded by BlackBerry, and that is directly tied to the additional revenue Typo could have expected from its illegal conduct.
Typo 2 unaffected
After the initial ruling, Typo released a second version dubbed the Typo 2 that was designed to avoid intellectual property conflicts with BlackBerry. A Typo representative said that ruling comes under the ongoing patent litigation related to the initial Typo product. “It has no impact on the Typo 2 product currently in the marketplace or our other planned product releases for the tablet,” the representative stated. A BlackBerry representative said the court order has said it all.
Typo’s keyboard was launched in December 2013. Media personality Ryan Seacrest invested $1 million in the product, which was the outcome of Apple users’ desire to use a physical keyboard on their touch screen device. Seacrest and his partner Lauren Hallier felt that many of their friends are roaming around with two phones, one for typing and correspondence, primarily a BlackBerry, and an iPhone for other things. BlackBerry sued Typo in January 2014, a few days after the original Typo model was launched.
BlackBerry’s complaint is a case no. 14-cv-00023-WHO in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.
