Here I thought patent disputes were only for large companies like Motorola and Kodak or patent trolls. K over at BBInsight let me know about an interesting new development. He heard about this oddball story from a anonymous BlackBerry developer (Lets call them ABC) who was sent a nasty letter from “The Jared Company.” It turns out that The Jared Company has had their lawyer Michael Kader send out threatening letters to other developers who created BlackBerry Flashlight applications.
This is where it starts to get interesting. Their lawyer Michal Kader sent ABC a letter saying that The Jared Company has applied for a “Patent for the process of their One-Touch-Flashlight invention.” Kader even claimed that their Patent Pending number is 61/254,690 which does not exist as far as we can tell.
Kader then goes on to say that if ABC continues to infringe on their “Patent” they will seek to recover the damages from today onward. He even has the balls to threaten that they will notify RIM’s BlackBerry App World and other distributors like Mobihand about this infringement which they claim puts ABS in a breach of contract position.
Now this just makes me wonder if the other 30+ developers of Flashlight applications in App World and Mobihand also got such a love letter from Kader & The Jared Company? Let us know if you have!
Now I am curious what you all think. Even if it were possible should developers be able to patent a way of performing a function programmatically on your BlackBerry? I personally think that would be ridiculous and I know for a fact that it is VERY difficult to get a software patent. From what I understand at most developers can get copyright for the written code but that is only relevant if another person copies the actual code which is hard to prove…
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