Untitled case

I'll research this case and the underlying patent before drafting the overview.

Now let me pin down the institution decision, the patent's title/priority, and the appellate outcome.

Let me verify the patent's title and chain, plus the Federal Circuit outcome of the parallel § 101 litigation.

Case overview — Snap Inc. v. BlackBerry Limited, IPR2019-00830 (PTAB)

A caption correction first. The metadata in the prompt styles BlackBerry as "defendant," but IPR2019-00830 was an administrative trial at the USPTO, not a district court suit: the petitioner was Snap Inc. (the Delaware corporation behind Snapchat) and the patent owner was BlackBerry Limited (the Canadian company formerly known as Research In Motion). Snap filed the petition on March 25, 2019, asking the Board to cancel claims 1, 2, 4–6, 8, 9, 11, 14–18, 20, 21, and 23 of U.S. Patent No. 8,296,351 — essentially the full asserted claim set. The Board denied institution on October 1, 2019 (Paper 7); per BlackBerry's later preliminary response in a follow-on Snap petition, the panel "refused to institute IPR2019-00830 finding that Petitioner had failed to demonstrate a reasonable likelihood of prevailing on the merits," i.e., a merits denial rather than a discretionary § 314(a) denial. Snap's grounds rested on WO 01/61559 to Noble, alone and in combination with Hassett, excerpts from Microsoft SQL Server 7 for Dummies (Mann), Johnson, and De Boor, supported by a declaration from Dr. Sandeep Chatterjee. PTAB petition papers; Mealey's, Mar. 26, 2019; Law360 docket page (showing "Institution Denied"); BlackBerry POPR in Snap's later petition (quoted above).

The parties, the patent, and the accused technology. BlackBerry is an operating company — the former RIM, inventor of the BlackBerry handset — that by 2018 had exited handset manufacturing and was monetizing its portfolio through licensing and litigation, including an aggressive multi-front campaign against social-media platforms. The '351 patent, "System and Method for Pushing Information to a Mobile Device" (Appl. No. 12/726,405, filed Mar. 18, 2010; issued Oct. 23, 2012; inventors Mihal Lazaridis, Gary P. Mousseau, and Michael S. Brown; assigned to Research In Motion, now BlackBerry), claims a July 23, 2001 priority date and is a continuation in a five-patent family that also produced the '244, '861, '769, and '929 patents. Technically, claim 1 is a server-side mobile-advertising architecture: a proxy content server receives information from networked sources and stores it into one of a plurality of "channels" (defined as memory locations) organized by pre-defined information categories; the server receives a feedback signal over the wireless network indicating the mobile device's position and uses it to select which channel's information to push to the device; the pushed information may be static, dynamic, or default advertising information, and combinations of static with dynamic/default ad content form a complete advertisement or "information bulletin." The accused technology was Snapchat's advertising and content-delivery platform as used in the parallel infringement action; the public record I located does not itemize which specific Snapchat features (e.g., ad server, geofilters, Stories) were charted to the '351 claims, so I'd treat any such feature-level mapping as unverified. Google Patents US8296351B2; SumoBrain record.

Procedural posture and why it matters. The IPR was a defensive flank in BlackBerry Ltd. v. Snap Inc., No. 2:18-cv-02693-GW-KS (C.D. Cal.), filed in spring 2018 and consolidated for pretrial purposes with BlackBerry Ltd. v. Facebook, Inc., No. 2:18-cv-01844-GW-KS, before Judge George H. Wu in the Western Division (Los Angeles), with Magistrate Judge Karen L. Stevenson; the '351 was Count V in the Snap case and Count VIII in the Facebook case, and was also asserted against Twitter in No. 2:19-cv-01444. The venue mattered because Judge Wu's courtroom became the single forum for the entire BlackBerry-versus-platforms campaign, and because it moved faster than the PTAB: on October 1, 2019 — the same day the Board denied Snap's petition — the court granted summary judgment that the '351 and '929 patents are invalid under 35 U.S.C. § 101, and final judgment under Rule 54(b) followed in November 2019. The case is therefore a clean illustration of a defendant winning on § 101 in court while losing the anticipation/obviousness fight at the Board, and of how that asymmetry reshaped strategy: Snap's later January 2020 petition on a narrower claim set (claims 1, 2, 14, 21) and its "me-too" joinder petitions (IPR2020-00391/'392) were both denied, with BlackBerry arguing unfair delay and that Snap had already had "one bite at the IPR apple" in IPR2019-00830. Parallel proceedings included Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp's IPR2019-00941 on the '351 (instituted December 4, 2019) and Twitter's IPR2019-01510, which was terminated pre-institution on January 10, 2020 after the parties' global settlement (Twitter represented by Paul, Weiss; BlackBerry by Quinn Emanuel). Notably, BlackBerry's '351 rights had a limited shelf life — the 2001 priority/2002 filing means the patent is now expired — so the IPR's real significance is as a data point on serial/duplicative petition practice, on merits-based versus discretionary denial, and on the interplay between PTAB validity trials and fast-moving § 101 rulings in the Central District. Final judgment, No. 2:18-cv-02693 (Nov. 15, 2019); Rule 54(b) stipulation and judgment, No. 2:18-cv-01844; IPR2019-01510 termination decision; IPWatchdog, July 23, 2020.

Unverified / open items. I could not independently confirm (a) the full text and reasoning of the October 1, 2019 institution denial in IPR2019-00830 (Paper 7) beyond secondary descriptions, (b) the complete list of Snap's IPR counsel in -00830, or (c) the Federal Circuit's disposition of BlackBerry's appeal from the § 101 judgment — Snap's later petition states the appeal was taken, but I did not locate a citable appellate opinion, so the affirmance/reversal should not be assumed. If you want, I can dig for the Paper 7 text in PTAB E2E and for the Federal Circuit docket number and outcome.

I'll research this. Note at the outset: the case metadata identifies this as IPR2019-00830 at the PTAB, not a district court litigation — so I'll need to establish what the underlying dispute was, who petitioned, and how the IPR interacted with any co-pending litigation. Let me dig in.

Key finding: IPR2019-00830 is Snap, Inc. v. BlackBerry Limited on the '351 patent, and it runs parallel to BlackBerry Ltd. v. Snap, Inc., No. 2:18-cv-02693 (C.D. Cal.). Let me establish the IPR's own docket history and the district court timeline.

Now let me pin down the IPR2019-00830 docket specifics and the Federal Circuit appeal.

Threshold correction on the case frame

The metadata you gave me describes IPR2019-00830, which is not a patent infringement litigation — it is a PTAB inter partes review: Snap Inc. v. BlackBerry Limited, on U.S. Patent No. 8,296,351 (“the ’351 patent,” System and Method for Pushing Information to a Mobile Device, Lazaridis et al., filed 2010-03-18, issued 2012-10-23). In that proceeding BlackBerry is the patent owner, not a defendant.

The infringement litigation proper was BlackBerry Limited v. Snap Inc., No. 2:18-cv-02693-GW-KSx (C.D. Cal.), filed 2018-04-03, plus its consolidated sibling BlackBerry Limited v. Facebook, Inc., No. 2:18-cv-01844-GW-KSx (C.D. Cal.), filed 2018-03-06, and BlackBerry Ltd. v. Twitter, Inc., No. 2:19-cv-01444-GW-KSx. Because the ’351 patent rose or fell in all three, I’ve traced the litigation chronologically with IPR2019-00830 as the thread.

Bottom line: IPR2019-00830 was denied institution on 2019-10-01 on the merits (Paper 7) — the Board found Snap had not shown a reasonable likelihood of prevailing. That denial mattered little in the end, because the same day Judge George H. Wu granted summary judgment of invalidity under § 101 against the ’351 claims. The patent was invalidated by the district court, not by the PTAB; the IPRs largely chased a dead patent.

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Chronology

1. Filing and initial pleadings

2. Pre-trial motions of substance

Alice motion to dismiss (June 2018). Facebook moved under Rule 12(b)(6), arguing the ’351 and ’929 patents claim the abstract idea of “sending advertisements to users based on triggering events.” The court denied the motion on these patents, identifying factual issues at Alice step two (Order at Dkt. 68, at 10–12 & 23 n.16). That denial is what set up the later summary judgment.

Motion to stay pending IPR (2019-04-16). Defendants moved to stay the entire consolidated case pending IPR institution decisions (Dkt. 161-1), arguing BlackBerry was asserting 11 patents across 15 patents-worth of combinations and that institution decisions were expected by “approximately November 2019.” The record I found does not contain the ruling; what is clear is that no stay issued — Markman and summary judgment went forward, and Defendants had to file a renewed motion to stay on 2019-12-16 (Dkt. 501) after the PTAB instituted Facebook’s IPR2019-00941. I could not verify the disposition of the renewed motion.

Summary judgment under § 101 (argued 2019-09-05; decided 2019-10-01). This is the dispositive event. Consolidated Defendants moved for SJ of invalidity of the ’351, ’929, and ’120 patents (Dkt. 239); Snap separately moved on the ’084 and ’327 patents (Dkt.

I'll start by searching for coverage of this IPR from several angles.

Key finding: the petitioner was Snap Inc., with BlackBerry as patent owner. Let me dig into the institution decision and any press coverage.

Now let me look for press coverage of the institution denial and the broader dispute.

Press coverage of IPR2019‑00830 (Snap Inc. v. BlackBerry Limited)

A necessary correction to the case framing first. The docket and the parties' own filings establish that this IPR was captioned Snap Inc. v. BlackBerry Limited, with Snap as petitioner and BlackBerry as patent owner — not the reverse as the case metadata implies. Mealey's reported on 2019‑03‑26 that Snap filed an IPR petition the previous day (March 25, 2019) arguing that claims of a BlackBerry patent "directed to 'pushing' targeted advertising to mobile devices would have been obvious to, or anticipated by, a person of skill in the art." That short item — a single-paragraph docket notice — appears to be the only dedicated press article on the petition itself. Snap's petition (Paper 1, IPR2019‑00830) challenged claims 1, 2, 4–6, 8, 9, 11, 14–18, 20, 21, and 23 of the '351 patent, a scope later recounted by IPWatchdog in its 2020‑07‑23 roundup of Snap's follow-on "me-too" joinder petitions.

The denial itself drew almost no press. I found no published article specifically reporting the Board's October 1, 2019 decision denying institution on the merits — the decision (Paper 7) in which the panel concluded that "Petitioner has not shown a reasonable likelihood that it would prevail in establishing the unpatentability of the challenged claims on any ground." The outcome is captured only in database and trade-tracker form: Law360's PTAB case page for Snap Inc. v. BlackBerry Limited lists the status as "Institution Denied," and IPWatchdog referenced the proceeding only as background when it reported that the Board exercised discretion to deny Snap's later joinder petitions IPR2020‑00391 and IPR2020‑00392. Anyone relying on press alone would not learn that the denial rested on the merits rather than on § 314(a) discretion, nor that the panel's reasoning turned on the prior art's failure to disclose the claimed "proxy content server" and advertising-information limitations.

Where reporting goes beyond the Board record, it does so by zooming out to the campaign. The '351 patent's more consequential fate was in district court: Law360 reported on 2019‑10‑02 that Judge George H. Wu "declared claims from six BlackBerry patents invalid under the U.S. Supreme Court's Alice decision, giving a leg-up to Facebook, Twitter and Snap" — the same day the Board denied Snap's petition. RPX characterized that ruling in more granular terms, noting that Facebook and Snap had argued the '351 and '929 patents were "unpatentably directed to the abstract idea of 'sending advertisements to users based on triggering events,'" and that Judge Wu had earlier denied Rule 12(b)(6) dismissal as to those patents before granting summary judgment of ineligibility. Nasdaq.com, in a Motley Fool–syndicated piece published 2019‑09‑11, went further into investor analysis, arguing that BlackBerry's "decision to sue Facebook and Snap makes sense, even if it caused critics to denounced [sic] it as a 'patent troll,'" while warning that "BlackBerry is clearly losing its firepower in both cases, and that could be bad news for one of its biggest businesses." That framing — IPRs as a hedge inside a broader licensing-revenue strategy — is editorial interpretation, not a court finding. IAM ran a related analysis on 2019‑10‑10 headlined around "Suits against Facebook, Snap and Twitter" indicating "a Blackberry change of tack," observing that "PTAB IPR institutions pile up" and that "how the cases pan out will be key to its licensing efforts"; I could only retrieve the headline and summary text, not the full article, so I cannot attribute more specific claims to it.

On the numbers. No outlet I found reported any damages figure, settlement amount, or market-impact quantification tied to IPR2019‑00830; the parties' dispute over the '351 patent was resolved on validity, not money. There is one factual discrepancy worth flagging: Law360's case tracker shows a filing date of April 5, 2019 for the Snap v. BlackBerry matter, while Mealey's reports the petition as filed March 25, 2019 — and the Board's own later decisions in IPR2020‑00391 refer to the March 25, 2019 filing. The Board record is the more reliable source here. The bottom line for a press-based reader: this particular IPR is essentially invisible in the trade press except as a footnote to the larger BlackBerry-versus-social-media litigation, and the reporting that does exist is dominated by the parallel § 101 rulings rather than by the PTAB's merits denial.

Sources

• UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
• UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
• UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
• UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
• BLACKBERRY LIMITED v. FACEBOOK INC (2019) | FindLaw - Here, the only alleged unconventional feature of BSG Tech's claims is the requirement that users are guided by summary compariso...
• Memorandum of Points and Authorities – #226, Att. #1 in BlackBerry Limited v. Facebook, Inc. (C.D. Cal., 2:18-cv-01844) – CourtListener.com - BlackBerry Limited v. Facebook, Inc.
• BLACKBERRY LIMITED v. FACEBOOK INC (2019) | FindLaw - • Thus, for example, any further motion to strike contentions, motion to amend a complaint, motion for summary judgment, Daubert...
• Memorandum of Points and Authorities – #226, Att. #1 in BlackBerry Limited v. Facebook, Inc. (C.D. Cal., 2:18-cv-01844) – CourtListener.com - 28 Tex
• BlackBerry Limited v. Facebook, Inc., 2:18-cv-01844 - CourtListener.com - MEMORANDUM in Opposition to Joint NOTICE OF MOTION AND MOTION for Summary Judgment as to Motion for Summary Judgement of Invalid...
• UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
• UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
• Complaint analysis | 2:19-cv-01444 | BlackBerry Ltd v. Twitter Inc | Ex Parte

I'll research this IPR and the underlying litigation to identify counsel.

I've identified the case: Snap Inc. v. BlackBerry Limited, IPR2019-00830 (a petition challenging BlackBerry's '351 patent). Let me find the petition and any Board decision to confirm counsel of record.

Key finding: this is Snap Inc. v. BlackBerry Limited, IPR2019-00830, filed March 25, 2019. Let me confirm the petition's counsel of record and the Board's denial decision.

Threshold point: there is no "plaintiff" in this proceeding

IPR2019‑00830 is Snap Inc. v. BlackBerry Limited, an inter partes review of U.S. Patent No. 8,296,351 (the "pushing information to a mobile device" / targeted‑advertising patent). The petition was filed March 25, 2019 challenging claims 1, 2, 4–6, 8, 9, 11, 14–18, 20, 21 and 23, and the Board denied institution on the merits (consistent with the case metadata). Mealey's reported the filing: Snap Inc. v. BlackBerry Inc., No. IPR2019‑00830 (PTAB), petition filed Mar. 25, 2019 (mealeys.com).

Because an IPR has a petitioner and a patent owner, not a plaintiff and defendant, I've set out both sides below — the functional "plaintiff" (the party that opened the proceeding, Snap Inc.) first — and flagged which capacity the metadata's "Defendant(s): BlackBerry Limited" implies.

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A. Petitioner's counsel — Snap Inc. (functional plaintiff here)

Sourcing / confidence: I could not open the IPR2019‑00830 power of attorney directly (PTAB document links were only partially retrievable), so the -00830 designation itself is inferred from two independent anchors:

1. BlackBerry's Patent Owner Power of Attorney in Snap's later '351 petition, IPR2020‑00391, certifies service on "counsel of record for the Petitioner" as "Yar R. Chaikovsky, David Okano, Chad Peterman, Paul Hastings LLP, 1117 S. California Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94304, Snap-Blackberry-PH-IPR@paulhastings.com" — the same patent, same petitioner, same campaign (ptacts.uspto.gov).
2. The same three names appear as Snap's counsel in the underlying C.D. Cal. case, and Chaikovsky is the ECF filer on Snap's PTAB‑related filings there (e.g., Dkt. 471, 484, 486 in No. 2:18‑cv‑01844) (CourtListener docket).

If you need certainty for a filing, the -00830 "Power of Attorney for Petitioner" (Paper 1 attachment) is the controlling document and should be pulled from PTAB E2E / Patent Center.

Local/district-court counsel for Snap (not PTAB counsel): Kenneth M. Fitzgerald and David T. Cochran, Fitzgerald Knaier LLP, San Diego, appeared as Snap's California local counsel in BlackBerry Ltd. v. Snap, Inc., No. 2:18‑cv‑02693‑GW‑KS (C.D. Cal.) (FindLaw opinion).

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B. Patent Owner's counsel — BlackBerry Limited (the "Defendant" in your metadata)

Sourcing: Glass and McKee are confirmed as BlackBerry's PTAB lead/back‑up pair in filings expressly cross-referencing Snap, Inc. v. BlackBerry Ltd., IPR2019‑00830 — e.g., the Patent Owner's Power of Attorney/mandatory notices served Sept. 6, 2019 (ptacts.uspto.gov) and the termination decision in Twitter's parallel IPR2019‑01510 on the same '351 patent (docketalarm). The district‑court names come from the C.D. Cal. docket and BlackBerry's own filings (Dkt. 281, 470 in No. 2:18‑cv‑01844; CourtListener).

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C. What I could not verify

• No counsel has "appeared" in the ordinary PACER sense — PTAB counsel designations are made via the mandatory notices/power of attorney in the petition, not a notice of appearance, and the -00830 petition and POPR documents themselves were not fully retrievable in this session.
• Nothing in this proceeding was sealed as to counsel; the sealing activity in the related C.D. Cal. case concerned merits materials, not the identity of counsel.
• I found no evidence of additional Paul Hastings or Quinn Emanuel attorneys (e.g., other associates) formally of record in -00830 beyond those listed; I have not guessed at names

I'll research this PTAB proceeding and identify counsel of record for BlackBerry Limited.

Now let me find the specific filings and outcomes in IPR2019-00830.

Let me pull the docket documents for IPR2019-00830 specifically.

Threshold clarification on party roles

IPR2019-00830 is not a district-court infringement action, so there is no "defendant" in the Rule 12 sense. It is Snap Inc. v. BlackBerry Limited, an inter partes review of U.S. Patent No. 8,296,351 (the '351 patent) filed March 25, 2019, in which BlackBerry Limited is the Patent Owner — i.e., the party the case metadata labels "Defendant." Snap's petition challenged claims 1–2, 4–6, 8–9, 11, 14–18, 20–21, and 23. The Board denied institution on October 1, 2019 (Paper 7), and BlackBerry's later filings confirm the denial was on the merits ("the Board subsequently refused to institute IPR2019-00830 finding that Petitioner had failed to demonstrate a reasonable likelihood of prevailing on the merits"). See Snap's joinder motion in IPR2020-00391 (quoting IPR2019-00830, Paper 7); BlackBerry's Preliminary Response in IPR2020-00391.

So the question resolves to: who represented BlackBerry Limited as Patent Owner in IPR2019-00830.

Counsel of record for BlackBerry Limited

Service address used by the team in the related '351 matters: qe-blackberry-ipr@quinnemanuel.com.

Sourcing and confidence level

Directly documented (high confidence): In the companion proceeding on the same patent, IPR2019-01510 (Twitter, Inc. v. BlackBerry Limited), BlackBerry's Mandatory Notices under 37 C.F.R. § 42.8, dated September 6, 2019, designate James M. Glass as Lead Counsel and John T. McKee as Back-up Counsel, both at Quinn Emanuel's New York office, with the qe-blackberry-ipr@quinnemanuel.com service address. The Board's January 10, 2020 termination decision in IPR2019-01510 likewise lists "James M. Glass / John McKee, QUINN EMANUEL URQUHART & SULLIVAN, LLP" as Patent Owner's counsel, alongside Paul, Weiss for Twitter. Those documents are in the PTAB's public file (ptacts.uspto.gov) and on Docket Alarm.

Inferred, not directly verified (moderate confidence): I was not able to retrieve IPR2019-00830's own Papers 3–5 (BlackBerry's Power of Attorney and Mandatory Notices) or the face of the October 1, 2019 institution decision (Paper 7), which would carry the caption-page counsel listing. The attribution of Glass/McKee to IPR2019-00830 rests on: (a) the same patent, (b) the same two-month window (Snap's petition March 25, 2019; BlackBerry's POA/mandatory notices in the contemporaneous Snap IPRs were filed April 26, 2019 and updated June 5, 2019), and (c) BlackBerry's consistent use of one Quinn Emanuel team across the entire '351 IPR family (IPR2019-00941, -01510, -01511) and the C.D. Cal. litigation. I did not confirm a signature block or mandatory notice bearing the IPR2019-00830 case number. Treat the names as highly likely but not docket-verified for this specific proceeding.

What I could not establish

• No in-house BlackBerry counsel appears in any public filing for this matter; BlackBerry's PTAB filings designate outside counsel only.
• No local counsel — the PTAB does not use a local-counsel requirement. Non-registered litigators appear only via pro hac vice motion under 37 C.F.R. § 42.10(c), and I found no pro hac vice filings in this proceeding.
• No substitution or withdrawal of counsel is documented; because the case was denied institution at the preliminary stage, the docket is short (petition, POA, mandatory notices, preliminary response, Paper 7 denial) and no counsel-change orders appear.
• I did not independently verify counsel in the underlying C.D. Cal. case (BlackBerry Ltd. v. Snap, Inc., No. 2:18-cv-02693-GW-KS), which was consolidated for pretrial purposes with BlackBerry Ltd. v. Facebook, Inc., No. 2:18-cv-01844-GW-KS. Firm websites and Law360/Reuters profiles for Glass and McKee were not retrieved in this session.

Caveat on the "not instituted – merits" status: that metadata is correct, but note the sequel — Snap filed a second, "me-too" petition (IPR2020-00391) mirroring Facebook's instituted IPR2019-00941 and sought joinder; the Board discretionarily denied that petition and joinder (covered in IPWatchdog's July 23, 2020 roundup), and the '351 claims were separately held § 101-ineligible in the C.D. Cal. litigation.