Once a cell phone leader Nokia has sued the now smartphone titan Apple of infringing its technology patents. The company says Apple has violated 32 of its patents on display, antennas, user interface, chipset, video coding and software. Nokia has hence filed a case in the courts of Mannheim, Dusseldorf and Munich, and the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.
Nokia said in a statement that after they agreed to a license in 2011 with Apple which covers some patents. They further stated that Apple declined subsequent offers by Nokia Technologies to license other patents which are now being used in many Apple products.”
Just after Nokia filed a lawsuit against Apple, the later filed a case against Acacia Research Corp and Conversant Intellectual Property Management Inc of conspiring against them. As per Apple, these firms along with Nokia are trying to mint money from these unfair tactics.
Apple spokesperson Josh Rosenstock said on this issue –
We’ve always been willing to pay a fair price to secure the rights of patents covering technology in our products.
He elaborated saying that Apple’s inventions have nothing to do with Nokia. Earlier, Nokia refused to license their patents on a fair basis and is now using patent troll to extort money from them.
A brief about Acacia Research and Conversant Intellectual Property Management. Acacia is a publicly traded patent licensing firm. In September, one of its subsidiaries was awarded $22 million from Texas jury in a patent infringement case against Apple. The other firm was also awarded $7.3 million from a Silicon Valley jury against the same company Apple.
Patent infringement lawsuits have picked up pace from past few years. A while back, Samsung was stuck in the patent infringement case filed by Apple, and now Nokia is blaming Apple for doing the same. BlackBerry also sued Avaya this year for infringing 8 US patents.
Nokia has lost ground in the smartphone market and is into feature phones. The mobile business of Nokia has been taken over by HMD, who is scheduled to launch Nokia-branded smartphones next year at MWC 2017.
