The Canada-based RIM sued Kik yesterday for allegedly infringing patents related to BBM. No exact details were disclosed, but the lawsuit does include accusations blaming Kik chief and former RIM employee Ted Livingston of unlawfully using information he obtained from the mobile maker in order to copy BlackBerry Messenger aspects.

“Kik was once the highlight of BlackBerry DevCon but suddenly fell out of favor in the past month, when RIM first pulled the app from BlackBerry App World and later disabled push support, rendering the app mostly useless even for those who already had copies. The Canadian phone company claimed that Kik had “breached contractual obligations” but has refused to say what those were.”

BBM and Kik are “real-time texting” competitors. With Kik being an independent cross-platform app supporting chat on BBOS, Android and iOS, unlike BBM. RIM may be worried it has the potential to drive away a significant portion of its audience remaining only because of their non-exportable Blackberry social contacts.

This situation began last week, with the unexpected ban of Kik downloads, and its denial of access to the BlackBerry Software Development Kit and Signing Keys. This ban directly affected 1 million of the total 2.5 million Kik users.  This is behavior we find typical of Apple, not RIM, but it’s certainly interesting to see how various platforms will be managing their app economies and markets.

In other copyright and patent infringement news from the tech industry, we covered here how some corporations are intensifying the patent warfare, taking their competition to court.