Defendant
3 cases as defendant.
BlackBerry Limited (NYSE/TSX: BB), commonly BlackBerry, is a Canadian software company headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario. It was founded in 1984 as Research In Motion and renamed BlackBerry in 2013. It is publicly traded and wholly independent (no parent). Headcount is roughly 1,750 employees, and revenue was about US$535M in fiscal 2025 and approximately US$549M in fiscal 2026 — down sharply from its smartphone-era peak after the 2016 exit from handset hardware.
Operations. BlackBerry now reports three segments. Its largest, QNX, supplies safety-certified embedded software — the QNX real-time operating system, QNX Hypervisor, the Software Development Platform, QNX OS for Safety, plus BlackBerry Radar (asset tracking), Certicom cryptography and BlackBerry IVY — used by automotive OEMs/Tier 1s and in medical, robotics and industrial automation; the company says QNX software runs in more than 255 million vehicles. Secure Communications covers BlackBerry UEM (unified endpoint management), BlackBerry AtHoc (critical event management) and BlackBerry SecuSUITE/Secusmart secure voice, sold mainly to governments and regulated enterprises. Licensing covers patent licensing and legacy service access fees. The company sold its Cylance endpoint-security business to Arctic Wolf in February 2025 for $160M cash plus equity.
Litigation posture. BlackBerry appears in the database as a pure defendant (0 plaintiff, 1 defendant suit), consistent with an operating company being targeted rather than a patent assertion entity. It holds its own patent portfolio (monetized through the Licensing segment) but has not been tracked as an active plaintiff here. The single tracked case sits in the District of Delaware, not in the plaintiff-friendly Eastern District of Texas.
Notable case. Maxell, Ltd. v. BlackBerry Corporation et al., No. 1:17-cv-01446 (D. Del., filed Oct. 13, 2017), accused BlackBerry's smartphones, tablets and mobile devices of infringing patents Maxell acquired from Hitachi/Hitachi Maxell and now enforces through a broad licensing campaign. Maxell is a Japanese consumer-products manufacturer (storage media, batteries, optical products) rather than a shell NPE, though Stanford's NPE database categorizes it as a "product company" asserting patents. BlackBerry moved to dismiss, counterclaimed, and the docket shows at least one count voluntarily dismissed in 2018.
Maxell sued BlackBerry Corporation and BlackBerry Ltd. in Delaware district court. BlackBerry filed an IPR on the '394 patent and the parties settled, with the case dismissed/closed on March 29, 2019.
Maxell, Ltd. sued BlackBerry Corporation and BlackBerry Ltd. in D. Del., listing U.S. Patent No. 6,580,999 among a multi-patent assertion. Maxell stipulated to dismissal of Count 1 in August 2018, and the case proceeded on remaining counts until it was ultimately resolved by the parties.
Maxell asserted U.S. Patent 7,995,897 against BlackBerry. The '897 count (Count 1) was dismissed by Maxell's stipulation docketed Aug. 24, 2018, and the case continued on other patents.