Post the scintillating announcement of its return to the smartphone world, Nokia has now launched a legal assault against Cupertino giant Apple. The former has filed multiple lawsuits against the latter and plans to drag them to court for allegedly infringing on nearly 32 mobile patents.
In an official blog post, Nokia mentions that the lawsuits filed against Apple in the US District Court of East Texas, along with three German cities. These patents lawsuits span over technologies including display, user interface, software, antenna, chipsets, and video coding, among others. It also includes at least one patent originating at Lucent Technologies, whose intellectual property has been bagged by Nokia through an acquisition earlier this year.
The Finland-based tech behemoth is rekindling its strenuous relation with Apple with these patent lawsuits, which are an extension of those the two of them had fought over between 2009 and 2011. Back then, the lawsuits spanning across the globe had been settled after a licensing agreement and a humongous payout. Both the tech behemoths reached an agreement where Apple agreed that it would cover the patents of the technologies it is employing.
Ever since the settlement in 2011, Nokia mentions that Apple has not been playing fair and refusing their subsequent offers “to license other of its patented inventions which are used by many of Apple’s products.” The settlement was valued at approximately $720 million. Talking about the same, Ilkka Rahnasto, head of Patent Business at Nokia, said,
Through our sustained investment in research and development, Nokia has created or contributed to many of the fundamental technologies used in today’s mobile devices, including Apple products. After several years of negotiations trying to reach agreement to cover Apple’s use of these patents, we are now taking action to defend our rights.
In addition, Apple has also filed an antitrust lawsuit against Nokia in the federal court in San Jose. The Cupertino giant has accused Nokia of not being forthcoming during the settlement and withholding a “massive numbers of patents” to extort excessive royalties from them. Thus, breaching the contract which had been signed about five years ago. A statement dispensed by an Apple spokesperson reads as under:
Apple is about innovation and our teams are dedicated to making the best products on earth. We respect intellectual property and we’ve always been willing to pay a fair price to secure the rights of patents covering technology in our products.
Unfortunately, Nokia has refused to license their patents on a fair basis and is now using the tactics of a patent troll to attempt to extort money from Apple by applying a royalty rate to Apple’s own inventions they had nothing to do with. We are standing up for inventors everywhere by fighting this flagrant anticompetitive practice.
We’ve contacted both Apple and Nokia for more information on the lawsuits and will update you once we hear back from them.
1 comment