David Paddon, THE CANADIAN PRESS

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TORONTO - Research In Motion (TSX:RIM) has filed a court challenge against Eastman Kodak Co., alleging that the camera company infringed on patents held by RIM - maker of the BlackBerry smartphones.

The suit, filed Thursday at a Dallas court, is a pre-emptive defensive move by the Waterloo, Ont.-based which says in its filing that it has "an objectively reasonable apprehension" that Kodak will sue it for alleged infringement of four patents.

"RIM denies that the Kodak patents are enforceable, valid and/or infringed by the accused products," the company said in its complaint.

Eastman Kodak Co. has already launched suits against several other companies, most recently South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co. and LG Electronics Inc., for allegedly infringing various digital-camera patents it obtained between 1993 and 2001.

RIM's claim says that Kodak asserted in an August 2007 letter to Research In Motion that the BlackBerry Pearl 8100 and the BlackBerry 8700 and 8800 series infringe on four Kodak patents.

The patents are related to image capture, compression and data storage, and a method for previewing.

Research In Motion is no stranger of patent litigation. It has usually come out the winner, but ended up paying US$612.5 million in February 2006 to settle with NTP Inc.

The battle with NTP, a private Virginia company set up specifically to defend and licence patents, had the potential to block RIM from access to much of the U.S. market.

The company, which is the leading supplier of wireless email products for the business market and a significant player in the consumer smartphone market, said it filed its suit against Kodak in Dallas because it's near RIM's U.S. headquarters.

Kodak of Rochester, N.Y. has licensed its imaging patents to various technology companies including Panasonic Corp., Motorola Inc., Nokia Corp., Olympus Corp. and Sony Corp.

In January 2007, Kodak ended a long-standing patent dispute with Sony over digital-camera inventions dating back to 1987 and entered a cross-licensing deal giving the companies access to each other's patents.

Kodak had alleged in a 2004 lawsuit that Sony infringed on 10 patents for digital camera patents issued from 1987 to 2003 involving digital and video technologies such as image compression and digital storage.

Kodak has amassed more than 1,000 digital-imaging patents - and almost all of today's digital cameras rely on that technology.