BlackBerry lawsuit crushes Ryan Seacrest’s smartphone keyboard

Sorry, Ryan — you’ve got no future as a keyboard player.

“American Idol” host Ryan Seacrest’s company Typo Products — which made plastic cases that add physical keyboards to iPhones — will stop selling them to settle a year-and-a-half legal spat with Blackberry.

Canada-based Blackberry had sued in January 2014 to block manufacture of Typo’s iPhone keyboards, saying they copied its designs. Two months later, Blackberry won a preliminary injunction from a federal judge.

But Typo continued to aggressively market the $99 keyboards, notably at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, where Seacrest demonstrated for tech journalists the “Typo 2,” which fits the iPhone 6.

“I like the feeling of those keys,” Seacrest told CNBC at the time, noting his disdain for the iPhone’s touch screen.

In February, US District Judge William Orrick in San Franscisco slapped Typo with an $860,600 fine plus attorney’s fees for violating the injunction he had issued nearly a year earlier, finding that Typo had since sold 19,000 of the keyboards.

Typo had argued that Blackberry hadn’t proven that its sales were hurt by the success of Typo’s keyboard. The judge partly agreed, but condemned ‘Typo’s not-so-clever attempts to evade the court’s preliminary injunction.”

Typo, a pet tech project of Seacrest’s and to which the Hollywood mogul reportedly funneled at least $1 million, is now forbidden under the patent-infringement truce to sell its keyboards for any device with a screen smaller than 7.9 inches.

That effectively relegates Typo’s business to tablets like the iPad — a far smaller slice of the market.