This is starting to get a little bit silly now.
You probably know all about the huge Legal war going on between Apple and Samsung at the moment, with each side flinging patent infringement suits at each other, one side complaining that the other has broken some spurious sounding piece of IP and as such must be banned.
You may have heard about Nokia doing something similar, and it would seem that today the Finnish giant have decided to really go all out on the legal battlefield.
Today, Nokia have filed suit against HTC, RIM (Who must already be hurting after the less than glowing reception that Blackberry OS 10 received) and Viewsonic in two different countries at once; pretty impressive, we’re sure you’ll agree.
What are they suggesting these companies have done? Well, the suits mention patents regarding dual function antennas, power management, multimode radios, app stores, navigation and data encryption amongst others. Nokia have come to rely on their royalty payments as their market share continues to dwindle. Their chief Legal Officer, Louise Pentland, was quoted as saying “Nokia is a leader in many technologies needed for great mobile products. We have already licensed our standards essential patents to more than 40 companies.
“Though we’d prefer to avoid litigation, Nokia had to file these actions to end the unauthorised use of our proprietary innovations and technologies, which have not been widely licensed.”
Of course, the other thing to consider is that companies do have to be seen to be protecting their IP or potentially face losing their patent – it’s entirely possible that this is nothing more than that, but the scale of this does suggest something more than that.
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