The Curious Case of My BlackBerry Patents
From the branches of the mighty pioneer to the roots of Palantir
You know the feature in WhatsApp where you can ‘star’ a message? I came up with that idea during my time at BlackBerry. BlackBerry owns the patent for it. When WhatsApp introduced the feature in 2016, BlackBerry didn’t do anything about it.
What could BlackBerry do? Politely ask WhatsApp to license the patent? Sue in patent litigation court?
Yes. That’s what I thought BlackBerry would do to protect the intellectual property developed by its impassioned engineers who believed till the very end that the smartphone keyboard would reign supreme. Alas the naivety of being a young software developer inflated my expectations so disproportionally.
I pictured my name being splashed as the inventor in news releases as BlackBerry sued Facebook (who owns WhatsApp). Maybe I’d get to testify in court about how the idea came about. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg would drop by during the testimony and I’d say ‘Hi!’.
Surely a small infringement on a feature that wasn’t a competitive advantage wouldn’t cause Blackberry to pull out its big guns in patent litigation. However, this apparent indifference was the first time I came to realize the truth of this artifact of innovation we refer to as…
