Typo Products LLC has been fined for violating the injunction barring it from selling its keyboard case, Reuters reports. Typo has been ordered to pay BlackBerry $860,600 in sanctions, in addition to attorneys’ fees and costs related to the violation of the injunction.
Last year, BlackBerry won a preliminary injunction against Typo, banning the keyboard case from being sold in the U.S. due to a ‘likelihood” of patent infringement.
Court documents revealed that Typo had sold approximately 19,000 of the original Typo keyboards after the preliminary injunction was issued, and while the company tried to make a case that BlackBerry could not demonstrate any lost sales as a result of Typo’s keyboards continuing to be sold, the judge noted that the company’s “not so clever attempts to evade the court’s preliminary injunction” were quite transparent. BlackBerry had asked the court for a fine of $2.64 million, refusing to comment further on the matter beyond a statement that the court order “speaks for itself.” In the order, the judge noted, “The amount of sanctions awarded is only a third of what BlackBerry sought and is directly tied to additional revenue that Typo could have expected from its illegal conduct.”
Typo released Typo 2 last fall, an updated version of the keyboard, redesigned to hopefully avoid further patent infringements claims while also adding additional features.