Its been a rough few months for RIM, announcing losses of $518m and cutting 5,000 jobs – but at least, you might think, it cant get any worse for the BlackBerry manufacturer. It has, though, with the company being ordered on Friday to pay $147.2m (£94.7m) in damages to device management company Mformation Technologies.

The US Federal District Court of Northern California found RIM guilty, by unanimous jury verdict, of infringing the patent on Mformations 1999 invention for managing wireless devices, with its BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), used by corporate enterprise customers for security and to manage their devices.

The amount is based on past sales of BES-connected BlackBerry smartphones in the US from late 2008, when the lawsuit was originally filed, equivalent to $8 per device sold. It doesnt include non-US sales or future royalties.

“Our patents are a core part of our innovative products, and are fundamental to the methods used for device management in the market today,” says Mformation founder and CTO Rakesh Kushwaha. “We ensured that our early innovations in device management were put through rigorous legal assessment by applying for patents on these innovations in the United States and abroad. Now these patented technologies are central to many critical mobile device management tasks being used by operators, service providers and enterprises around the world.”