Deja vu: Nokia sues Apple over patent infringement
Source: | Filed in
Technology | 
Subscribe to Savvy Investor via RSS
5/07/10Apparently, the wheels on the lawsuit also go round and round. Nokia announced on Friday that it was suing Apple for intellectual property infringement. If you think you’ve just seen a glitch in the Matrix, don’t worry: this isn’t the first time the Finland-based company has taken legal action against Cupertino.
This most recent lawsuit, filed in the U.S. Federal court of the Western District of Wisconsin, sees Nokia targeting the iPhone and iPad 3G for infringement of five Nokia patents. The mobile phone maker has been kind enough to detail them in a press release:
The patents in question relate to technologies for enhanced speech and data transmission, using positioning data in applications and innovations in antenna configurations that improve performance and save space, allowing smaller and more compact devices.
Well, those all certainly sound like they describe aspects of the iPhone and 3G-enabled iPad. But couldn’t Nokia have included these allegations in one of its previous suits? After all, everybody likes a bundle deal.
If you’re having trouble following the whole tortured legal web, we don’t blame you. Allow us to present this condensed timeline of the legal machinations between the two companies.
In October 2009, Nokia sued Apple in the U.S. Federal District Court in Delaware over ten different violations; Apple responded with its own countersuit in December of last year, raising the stakes to 13 patents. The two sides also each filed respective complaints with the U.S. International Trade Commission to block the other company from importing its goods into the country. In March, the Delaware judge suspended the infringement suit until the ITC investigations were resolved. It’s certainly clear we haven’t heard the last of this ongoing legal battle over who invented what and when.
As to why Nokia would file suit in Wisconsin, it’s not immediately clear—though we imagine it is not (merely) out of a fondness for the state’s legendary cheese prowess.
Nokia has been losing marketshare,brand appeal and pricing power in the mobile phone market since it reached its peak with Motorola self destructing.After that it has been a downhill story for the company as you can read in my earlier posts. Now it seems that the Company has already realized that it is a low probability event to win back its mobile phone marketshare . Instead its trying to extract patent revenue from the winners. Apple is The Company to beat in the Smartphone market with the iconic iPhone.Nokia is trying to instead extract money by suing its rivals since it can’t make too much money by building products through it patents.These patent battles are extremely complex with both companies having a huge number of patents to fight with.Usually leads to a settlement after years of litigation.Mostly lawyers get rich.Read more at http://www.greenworldinvestor.com