In some rare good news for BlackBerry, the company just won a court case against Typo. We told you a bit about this injunction back in January. Anyhow, as we wrote, “In a nutshell, the Typo Keyboard – backed by none other than Ryan Seacrest – gives users a thumb-style physical keyboard for theiPhone 5 and 5S. The Typo Keyboard provides an extremely user-friendly, tactile keyboard.”¹

Though the Typo case bears a striking resemblance to the BlackBerry QWERTY keyboards, Laurence Hallier – the designer of the case – told us in an interview at CES that they had been working on this design for more than 18 months and made sure several times that they were not violating Blackberry’s patents:

BlackBerry won a preliminary injunction to ban Typo from selling their keyboard. However, Typo voiced its displeasure with the ruling, and vowed to pursue an appeal, noting: “Typo will continue to make and sell innovative products that busy people can’t live without.”² The details of the injunction were noted by Reuters:

U.S. District Judge William Orrick in San Francisco said that the Canadian mobile phone maker had established a “likelihood” of proving that Typo infringed its patents, while mentioning that Typo had not sufficiently challenged the patents in question.

The preliminary injunction prohibits Typo from the sale of its keyboard, which is a part of the relief sought by Blackberry.³

Obviously Hallier’s confidence in the video above was a bit premature. We will keep you updated as more news comes in.