RIM is asking a court to permit it to hire former employees of hard-hit rival Motorola. The Canada-based handset maker claims Motorola is blocking its workers from joining the BlackBerry manufacturer.
The case revolves around a February agreement between RIM and Motorola which forbade the two companies poaching employees. RIM said the agreement expired in August and wants the court to invalidate the pact.
“RIM entities continue to grow and hire new employees within the United States and globally against a backdrop of recent public announcements by Motorola that it has and will continue to make massive layoffs,” according to the RIM lawsuit filed last week.
To combat lower handset sales, 3,000 Motorola workers were axed and the Schaumburg, Ill-based company recently announced it would cut pay and benefits.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
