Dolby sues RIM over unlicensed use of its technology

It looks like things aren’t going too well for RIM. The company’s latest product, the BlackBerry PlayBook hasn’t exactly been flying off the shelves, and now the company has just come under fire with a lawsuit from Dolby. Dolby Laboratories has filed a lawsuit against RIM for using Dolby’s audio compression technologies in its BlackBerry smartphones and BlackBerry PlayBook without acquiring any proper licenses from the company.

Dolby filed the lawsuits in the US and Germany, seeking financial damages for past use and injunctions to stop the sales of unlicensed RIM devices in the countries. Apparently this isn’t Dolby’s first move against the company. It mentioned that “Litigation was regrettably our last resort after RIM declined to pay for the use of Dolby’s technology”. It looks like RIM has been ignoring Dolby’s requests for them to acquire licenses for some time now.

The technologies in question are Dolby’s patented technologies that provide the core of an audio compression standard widely used in mobile devices such as smartphones, portable music players and tablets. It allows devices to play high-quality audio with limited transmission and storage space. Dolby also mentioned that all other major smartphone makers have licensed the technology from them. It makes you wonder why RIM has refused to follow suit. Stay tuned and we’ll keep you posted.

George Wong
Categories: Audio
Tags: dolby, lawsuit, license, Patent, RIM, technology