BlackBerry is trying to prevent Ryan Seacrest from selling an iPhone accessory

BlackBerry has spent much of the past year trying desperately to make its phones seem more like iPhones, so one can only imagine how troubling it must be to executives at the company’s Waterloo headquarters that a start-up co-founded by Ryan Seacrest has managed to solve the problem by taking the opposite approach: instead of turning BlackBerries into iPhones, Typo Products LLC is selling a special snap-on case that endows an iPhone with a BlackBerry-style QWERTY keyboard.

BlackBerry brought a patent-infringement lawsuit against Typo earlier this month. Now, Bloomberg reports that the smartphone maker is taking the next logical step. On March 5, a U.S. judge will hear BlackBerry’s request for a court order blocking Typo from selling or promoting its product. The good news for Typo and Seacrest is that the first batch of the keyboard cases is already completely sold out, probably at least partly thanks to all the lawsuit-related publicity.