Former smart phone maker BlackBerry Ltd has filed a case against Twitter for illegally using technology that had initially been developed by BlackBerry.
Being an early provider of messaging services, including the BlackBerry Messenger, BlackBerry was well known for its mobile email devices.
The company has had similar court battles of infringement of patents against Facebook Inc and Snap Inc last year.
The lawsuit against Twitter said that Twitter wrongly sought to compensate for being a “relative latecomer” to mobile messaging by co-opting Blackberry’s inventions for such services as the main Twitter application and Twitter Ads, infringing six of the company’s patents.
Twitter, “succeeded in diverting consumers away from BlackBerry’s products and services” and toward its own by misappropriating features that made BlackBerry “a critical and commercial success in the first place,” the complaint said.
BlackBerry filed its complaint with the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.
Wu may again be assigned the case against San Francisco-based Twitter because federal courts often assign cases deemed “related” to a single judge. The Facebook and Snap lawsuits were deemed related.