Research In Motion Limited (RIM) — now BlackBerry Limited
Company overview. Research In Motion Limited was a Canadian wireless technology company founded in 1984 in Waterloo, Ontario, by Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin. It was publicly listed on NASDAQ (RIMM) and the TSX (RIM). In January 2013 the company rebranded as BlackBerry and formally changed its legal name to BlackBerry Limited (NYSE/TSX: BB) that year; "Research In Motion" therefore has no separate current existence. For scale: FY2013 revenue was about $11.1B with roughly 12,700 employees (BlackBerry FY2013 filings). The successor company reported FY2025 (ended Feb. 28, 2025) revenue of $534.9M across three segments — Secure Communications ($272.6M), QNX ($236.0M) and Licensing ($26.3M) — with roughly 1,800 employees and a market capitalization near $2B (GlobalData; BlackBerry FY2025 results).
Products / operations. RIM was an operating company, not a licensor shell. It designed and sold BlackBerry smartphones (Bold, Curve, Torch, Z10, Q10), the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, and the BlackBerry Enterprise Server / BlackBerry Internet Service push-email infrastructure that generated recurring carrier service fees. The post-2013 successor exited handset manufacturing and now sells enterprise software: QNX real-time OS for automotive and embedded systems, BlackBerry UEM, AtHoc, and SecuSUITE/Secusmart secure communications (Cylance was sold in FY2025).
Litigation posture. The tracked data shows 2 cases as defendant, 0 as plaintiff — the signature of an operating company being sued rather than an asserter. Both are NPE suits targeting BlackBerry devices and services. Venue included the plaintiff-friendly Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division.
Notable cases. Prism Technologies LLC v. Research In Motion, Ltd. et al. (D. Neb., Dec. 29, 2008) asserted U.S. Patent 7,290,288 on authentication-server network access against RIM and Microsoft; Prism is a Nebraska patent-holding company and wholly owned subsidiary of NASDAQ-listed Prism Technologies Group, and it filed similar suits against U.S. wireless carriers (Law360). Rembrandt Wireless Technologies, LP v. Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. et al. (E.D. Tex., Mar. 15, 2013) asserted U.S. Patent 8,023,580 against Bluetooth EDR-compliant products, naming BlackBerry Z10, Q10, Bold and PlayBook devices; Rembrandt is a Virginia limited partnership based in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, and the case produced a $15.7M Samsung verdict later vacated on marking grounds (Fed. Cir. 2017). Outcomes of the RIM-specific claims are not tracked in this dataset.