Wireless patent suit still murky
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Research In Motion (RIMM), maker of the popular BlackBerry wireless e-mail device, got mixed news in court Tuesday - and a worst-case scenario that would stop BlackBerry sales in the USA.
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Sectors of the Internet world are still buzzing over the release of a Microsoft patent application that appears to claim rights to the underlying method proposed by companies to better determine
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Ringback technology company Ring Plus sued U.S. wireless carrier Cingular in federal court Tuesday, although it wasn't immediately clear what patents the carrier was accused of infringing.
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Vonage downplays an appeals court decision affirming an earlier verdict of patent infringement on two patents owned by Verizon.
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As reforms trickle in, the telecom industry is still subject to patent abuse.
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High-stakes patent royalties battle enters another round.
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Bidding remained stalled Tuesday on  a key piece of spectrum in the U.S. government's wireless  airwaves auction, prompting concern regulators will have to  modify rules requiring some of it be shared with public safety  agencies.
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Motorola has settled a long-running patent dispute with Metrologic Instruments, a maker of bar-code scanners.Motorola inherited the lawsuit as part of its 2006 acquisition of wireless handhold device maker Symbol Technologies. Symbol and Metrologic had been engaged in the spat since early 2002, when Symbol sued Metrologic, claiming that the company had failed to make adequate royalty payments.Symbol was a maker of wireless barcode scanners that are used by delivery and warehouse workers to keep track of inventory.In 1996, Metrologic licensed Symbol&#39;s barcode scanning technology for use with its handheld scanners, paying Symbol royalties of $10 per scanner. However, in 2001 Metrologic stopped making these payments, claiming that &quot;product changes had pushed the scanners beyond the scope of definitions laid out in the agreement,&quot; according to Symbol.The actual amount in dispute had been less than $500,000 Metrologic has said.In June 2003 Metrologic counter-sued, claiming patent infringement.Monday&#39;s agreement settles all pending litigation and enters Motorola and Metrologic into a patent cross-license deal that covers barcode scanning and mobile computing technology, they said in a statement. Terms of the settlement were not released.
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(InfoWorld) - Ongoing legal disputes over mobile phone patents between Nokia and Qualcomm are consuming much executive management time, generating substantial lawyer fees, and, if they escalate, could affect handset development and prices, experts warn. Defending IP (intellectual-property) rights through litigation "is the nature of the business," said Chris Jones, senior analyst with Canalys.com in Reading, England. "But in the case of Nokia and Qualcomm, unfortunately, it's been taking up too much management time." On Monday, Nokia responded to a patent lawsuit filed by Qualcomm in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas by filing a counterclaim against the U.S. company. Over the past two years, Qualcomm has filed 11 lawsuits against Nokia, according to a Nokia spokeswoman. The initial Qualcomm lawsuit filed in Texas deals with three patents related to the downloading of applications and other digital content over GPRSÂ or EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution) networks, two technologies for speeding the transmission of packet data in GSM networks. Nokia contends that Qualcomm's patents are invalid and, in addition, has asked the Texas court to stop Qualcomm from using six Nokia implementation patents used in Qualcomm's MediaFlow and Brew technologies. Standards bodies divide patents touching the technologies they define into two categories: Those essential to a standards-compliant product, and those that only cover a particular implementation of the standard. This is the second counterclaim filed by the Finnish manufacturer. On April 2, Nokia filed a counterclaim in the U.S. Western District of Wisconsin, accusing Qualcomm of infringing on six of its patents relating primarily to multiband and multimode technologies that reduce handset and chipset size, cost, and power consumption. The counterclaim came in response to Qualcomm's initial lawsuit filed in the same court over two patents covering speech encoders used in certain GSM phones to digitize audio signals for transmission. So far, the patent infringement lawsuits against Nokia "haven't taken the vendor's eye off the ball when it comes to developing and bringing handsets to market," Jones said but warned of "too much management time being focused on these litigation cases." Nokia is in "close discussions" with its partners and customers to keep them informed of how the company is dealing with litigation, the spokeswoman said. "Our view is that they respect our right to protect our patents and our business, and to take the action we need to take," she said. Andrew Gilbert, president of Qualcomm Europe, argues that the company's licensing model has created greater competition in the market by allowing vendors without GSM patents to enter the market and compete more easily. The model, known as "pass through rights," lets manufacturers obtain the rights to use numerous GSM patents already licensed by Qualcomm -- in addition to the company's own CDMA patents -- instead of having to strike separate royalty deals with each GSM patent holder. "We think our model drives down prices of royalties and thus the price of handsets," he said. But Gilbert conceded that the current litigation is a cost factor. "Clearly, we'd rather be spending the couple of hundred million dollars on innovation," he said. That sum could easily rise as the chronology of the legal battles between Qualcomm and Nokia suggests: On Oct. 28, 2005, Nokia and five other companies, including Broadcom and Telefonaktiebolaget Ericsson, filed a complaint to the European Commission over Qualcomm's high royalty rates, among other issues. The Commission has yet to make a decision. On Nov. 4, 2005,Â Qualcomm filed a lawsuit against NokiaÂ in the federal court of San Diego, California, over GSM patents. The court put the case on hold, pending further information. On May 24, 2006,Â Qualcomm filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Nokia in the U.K.Â over two GSM patents. The trial is expected later this year. On June 9, 2006, Qualcomm filed a complaint against Nokia with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) over six GSM patents. The company later withdrew three, and the ITC has meanwhile put the case on hold. On Aug. 9, 2006, Qualcomm filed a GSM patent infringement lawsuit against Nokia in Germany. The trial is set for September. On the same day,Â Nokia filed a case in Delaware, claiming that Qualcomm breached its written contractual obligations to license essential GSM and 3G (third-generation) patents on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms. On Oct. 4, 2006, Qualcomm filed a patent infringement lawsuits against Nokia in France and on Oct. 16 in Italy over GSM technologies. On Feb. 2, 2007, Qualcomm filed three complaints in China over GSM patents. On March 19, Nokia filed complaints against Qualcomm patents in Germany and the Netherlands. On April 2, Qualcomm filed the two cases against Nokia in Wisconsin an Texas. And on May 24,Â Nokia filed a counter-claim against QualcommÂ in response to the lawsuit filed in Wisconsin.
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Legal dispute over storage patent is about to get going in earnest, part of a wider skirmish over security software turf.
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The latest twist in a landmark file-sharing case could lead to a world where open wireless networks constitute a legal liability. In Listening Post.
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A proposal for city-wide Wi-Fi in San Francisco remains embroiled in controversy as key votes have been delayed.
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(InfoWorld) - A German court stayed a patent-infringement case that Qualcomm filed against Nokia, as hearings regarding a similar case in the U.S. International Trade Commission suit continue. On Tuesday, the District Court of Dusseldorf, Germany, ordered a stay of proceedings until further notice based on a request by Qualcomm, Nokia said. A hearing in that case had been scheduled for Tuesday. Meanwhile, hearings for theÂ patent-infringement case that Qualcomm brought against NokiaÂ in the U.S. ITC started on Monday and will last until Sept. 24. At issue are patents Qualcomm owns related to power control used in EDGE (Enhanced Data GSM Environment) and GPRS (General Packet Radio Service). The initial ITC complaint included six Qualcomm patents, but Qualcomm later reduced the complaint to cover just three. Qualcomm initially declared one of the patents as essential to the standards, but later withdrew the essentiality declaration, according to Nokia. Qualcomm did identify the patent as one that may be essential, but after further investigation determined that it wasn't, said Alex Rogers, legal counsel for Qualcomm. But that issue is irrelevant to this case, he said, which charges Nokia with patent infringement. The hearings this week are dedicated to Qualcomm testimony and has included participation by Chuck Wheatley and Ana Weiland, former Qualcomm developers who worked on the patented technology, Rogers said. Nokia will also have five days to present its witnesses. The mobile giant will argue that it does not infringe on the patents and that the patents are invalid, it said. The judge will issue an initial determination after the hearings are complete. The commission then has an opportunity to accept or modify the judge's decision and issue a final determination. The U.S. ITC case is one ofÂ several ongoing suits between Qualcomm and Nokia. In August,Â Nokia asked the ITCÂ to launch a separate investigation, charging Qualcomm with patent infringement. In June, Nokia charged Qualcomm with infringing on patents in its MediaFlo and Brew products. In a statement in May, Nokia said that Qualcomm has filed 11 patent suits against Nokia in just over a year and a half. The ongoing dispute between the companies likely stems from their failure to renegotiate their patent licensing agreement that expired in April. Nokia has said that it believes Qualcomm, which is well-known for its development of the CDMA wireless technologies, charges more than fair and reasonable rates when licensing the technology to be used in standards-based equipment. In a separate intellectual-property battle, theÂ ITC recently banned the importÂ of mobile phones with certain Qualcomm chips, based on a case Broadcom filed.
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NTP Inc, which last year won a $612.5 million settlement from the maker of Blackberry, has sued several leading wireless companies for patent infringement, according to court papers.
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Ongoing legal disputes over mobile phone patents could affect handset development and prices, experts warn.
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A proposal for a wireless phone directory raises concerns in Congress.
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The patent holding company that successfully produced a $612.5 million patent infringement settlement with BlackBerry producer Research In Motion even while the US Patent and Trademark Office was doubting the validity of its patents, has filed suit against the US' four leading wireless carriers for infringement of what are believed to include some of the same disputed patents.