I dunno, this whole affair definitely seems poorly thought out. BlackBerry app development is horrible enough as it is, and there are more and more things making it unappealing. (one of the CEOs said mobile apps are a fad a few weeks ago)
BBM is the one killer-app keeping people using blackberries due to the network effect.
The only reason I still have a blackberry is because friends and family in far off countries also have them, and vice-versa - we cna talk to each other freely and easily on the run. BBM is really good at this. We would all have to switch to something new, and just as reliable, at the same time to make jumping platforms viable.
As soon as there is something that works as well as BBM that's cross platform, lots of people will jump ship as soon as they are able, as long as they can reach their BBM friends (who will eventually jump ship too)
Push email is now a commodity, via push IMAP, push Exchange, COMET webmail, and a bucketload of other apps.
BBM is one of the last things unique to BB. Of course it will inevitably be commoditized, but BB will try and delay this as long as possible using whatever tactics it can.
If you can get a nicer quality smartphone that does instant messaging, and push email, why would you want a BB with a poor quality web browser and a paltry few shitty quality apps?
METHOD FOR CREATING A PEER-TO-PEER IMMEDIATE MESSAGING SOLUTION WITHOUT USING AN INSTANT MESSAGING SERVER
I hope they lose the case and their patent is invalidated. (Isn’t this system highly similar to how Napster messaging and AIM “direct connection” chats worked, before 2004?)
Anyway, here’s another US patent that could be relevant. Seems even weaker, though: “A method of displaying messages on handheld devices. The device displays messages in a scrollable viewport of vertically arranged fields. Date separators inserted into the vertically arranged list of messages to enable the user to associate the messages with a date. …”
4G cellular networks are all IP and use SIP for signalling. I doubt phones are publicly addresssable though, the telco probably NATs them.
I eagerly await a number-free, VoIP-enabled, IPv6 world.
Interesting strategy. RIM can't do much directly about the iOS and Android competition. But they can sue popular cross-platforms apps. Evil evil evil.
But I don't see this as significantly more evil than "just removing them from the store". A lawsuit shows that RIM has a serious grievance (whether justified or not) and moves to settle the matter of competition through an official legal framework (whether flawed or not).
Unilaterally removing an application from app markets that are "open to all developers unless we say they're not" for competitive reasons strikes me as more evil in some ways. We are just a lot more used to it because of Apple's app store.
Banning them from the store/crippling their existing installs is basically: "we don't like you competing with our first party offerings, so get the hell off our platform"
Suing them now, given that Kik is still active on other platforms, is basically: "we don't like you competing with our offerings, so we're going to prevent you from operating anywhere, even on platforms we don't own or have any control over"
I don't know about you, but the second seems a bit more evil than the first.
RIM could have walked over to their office and had been like, "hey, can yous guys stop the messenger app. k thx. bai".
Google Map: http://bit.ly/ftLWro
"As a trademark must be used to maintain rights in relation to that mark, a trademark can be 'abandoned' or its registration can be cancelled or revoked if the mark is not continuously used. By comparison, patents and copyrights cannot be 'abandoned' and a patent holder or copyright owner can generally enforce their rights without taking any particular action to maintain the patent or copyright."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark#Comparison_with_paten...
I can easily see how choosing not to enforce a patent might make it harder to claim infringement in a later case.
It's not that the patent would expire, but that there would be a precedent of not caring about infringers.
1. There's a thing called "laches", which basically makes it so you can't recover damages from before the time you file the suit if you waiting too long to file the suit. There's a rebuttable presumption that six years is too long.
What that means is that if you find out about the infringement and wait six or more years to file, you will get no damages from before the date of the suit unless you can prove to the court that there was justification for waiting so long.
If you file before six years, there is no presumption of laches, but the plaintiff can try to prove to the court that your delay was unreasonable.
Note that even if the plaintiff gets no damages, he can still get an injunction to stop continuing infringement regardless of how long he delays. Thus, in a case like this where RIM's likely goal is to kill the infringing product rather than to collect money for past infringement and perhaps license the product going forward laches is no problem.
2. I believe in some cases, the courts have used "equitable estoppel" to prevent the patent owner from taking any action against a particular defendant. For this to happen the patent would have had to do something that reasonably gave the defendant reason to believe they had permission to use the patent and the defendant would have had to rely on that.
Equitable estoppel doesn't necessarily involve a delay in suing, but a long delay would be a factor I'd expect the court to look at as it provides at least some support for the claim that the defendant reasonably thought they had permission.
An example of where I'd expect equitable estoppel to play a role would be if Microsoft ever decided to sue over the parts of Mono that are not covered by either the Community Promise (which covers the ISO/ECMA version of .NET) or the Apache license (which they have released much of the mobile .NET stuff under). Microsoft has ignored the potentially infringing parts of Mono for a long time, and has actively encouraged the Mono project as a whole and even made changes on Microsoft's end to make some of their stuff work better with Mono. I think the Mono people could make a good case that Microsoft's action gave them a reasonable belief that they were OK, and Microsoft knew that the Mono people thought that.
0) Kik is like cross-platform BBM for Blackberry, Android, and iOS users.
1) RIM had previously removed Kik from the Blackberry “App World” store.
2) Then two weeks later, they revoked Kik’s developer keys and crippled existing Kik installs by disabling Push support. This meant Blackberry Kik users (reportedly over a million of them) would start getting Kik messages up to an hour late. Link / discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1935093
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A week ago, we discussed the possibility of a lawsuit. Discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1935182
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Strikes me as evil and, as some of you are saying, a bad move politically for their platform. Even if only those 1,000,000 Kik on BB users care, and most BB users don’t, we developers generally give a shit, because this seems grossly uncalled for and anticompetitive.
If they are stealing IP then RIM should not have let them onto the store to begin with. RIM should know what their IP is.
I would say that if they RIM already reviewed their app and let it onto the store, that is a tacit implication that they approved the app with RIM's (alleged) IP in it.
Doesn't seem evil to me.
What I'm saying is that it doesn't seem unreasonable, as others are making it out to be, for RIM to sue a company for making a product that's nearly identical to its own.
Now for Waterloo region which has been trying to make a name for itself in the tech/startup world, having a Next Big Thing coming out of it would have been huge. It would have benefited the region from a financial standpoint (think PayPal mafia) and it would have benefited the region from a talent attraction standpoint.
RIM's actions are not only an assault on Kik they're an assault on Waterloo's startup community as a whole.
C'mon now, let's not be quick to judge. What if this lawsuit had to do with Kik violating your privacy? Sharing your contacts' information, etc.
Could be something more than that, as the CEO was a RIM employee at one point.
Having family work at their Waterloo head office leaves me torn and full of questions. Even though I don't own a RIM phone, I handled their Storm and it's rock solid. The feel is much better my 3G test phone or couple of Android phones, but as a developer I choose to support companies based on merit. RIM just came down a notch in my book.
I compared Kik on my Android and the BBM on the Storm. I would be flabbergasted to find out the Canadian courts would allow this claim to play out.
Funny how RIM wrote an open letter (strangely removed from their site now) about how patents were a problem, and needed to be reformed. They got sued for similarly obvious patents not long ago, and had a very different attitude from the defendant's side of the argument.
Article about the now redacted letter: http://goo.gl/e6e4U
This is what the article links to: http://cas-ncr-nter03.cas-satj.gc.ca/IndexingQueries/infp_RE...
I doubt this lawsuit has any real substance. Other than RIM dragging Kik through the equivalent of a legal hell, there doesn't seem to be much there.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870459480457564...
Not a minor point.
http://us.blackberry.com/developers/browserdev/
The key viral feature was using the addressbook to populate the contact list, and you'd lose that, but still be able to implement a bunch of the other stuff. I can't tell from that browserdev page how much of the "widget API" is stuff that you'd need to get bundled up and signed, and how much is just available in the browser.
Either way, this is a pretty developer-hostile move on RIM's part. That's okay, though; all indications are that RIM is capable of developing a large selection of beautiful, compelling, worthwhile first-party apps for the Playbook. A third-party developer ecosystem would really just weigh the platform down.
My take: RIM saw the violations and the threat to BBM and decided to ban Kik. Apple saw the violations and the threat to BBM and decided to leave them alone. Makes sense in both cases
So the guy admits to not reading the statement outlining the allegation, but he will comment on it anyway.
I love Kik; it is a brilliantly simple app that I use everyday and I would certainly be happy if more of my friends used it.
