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Court Rules in Suit over Stones Blackberry License

By Stan Soocher

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York decided that The Rolling Stones' tour management company didn't breach the exclusivity terms of an agreement for use of Stones intellectual properties in conjunction with the planned development of a limited-edition Blackberry smartphone. RST (2005) Inc. v. Research in Motion Ltd. (RIM), 07 CV 3737(VM).

RST was formed to manage The Rolling Stones' 2005-2007 “A Bigger Bang” tour. RST entered into an agreement in October 2005 to exclusively license to RIM intellectual properties of The Stones ' including trademarks, logos, photos and video clips ' to develop a limited-edition Blackberry. The agreement promised RST a $1 million licensing fee, and that RIM would invest $5 million in developing and promoting the smartphone, or pay RST the difference if less than $5 million was spent. However, in September 2005, Virgin Records, for which The Stones recorded, had struck a deal with SanDisk for use of some of the same Stones intellectual properties to promote a “Gruvi” flash memory card. When Palm used these Stones intellectual properties to advertise an offer of a free Gruvi card with the purchase of a Palm handheld device, RIM informed RST that their agreement was terminated and refused to develop the limited-edition Blackberry.

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