AT&T, Microsoft take patent battle to US Supreme Court
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Telecommunications giant AT&amp;T and Microsoft took a patent battle to the US Supreme Court Wednesday, in a case that has wide implications for US firms doing business abroad.
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Court sends patent suit back to lower court in case over Google's AutoLink toolbar feature.
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A US court rules Microsoft must pay phone equipment firm Alcatel-Lucent $1.52bn (Â£777m) for infringing patents.
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TORONTO - A US appeals court ruled Tuesday that Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry e-mail device, infringed on another company&#39;s patent - but sent the case back to a lower court for some of the claims to be reconsidered.
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How significant is the US Patent and Trademark Office&#39;s initial rejection of Microsoft&#39;s FAT (file allocation table) file system patent claims?
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High-stakes patent royalties battle enters another round.
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AT&amp;T Corp., MCI Inc., and a number of smaller telephone companies were rebuffed by the US Supreme Court yesterday in their quest to save cut-rate deals to rent Bell System phone lines they use to serve business and residential customers.
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Microsoft began its appeal yesterday against a $565m judgment that it infringed on a patent held by Eolas, a University of California spin-off.
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(InfoWorld) - Nokia and Qualcomm have entered a new round in their high-stakes fight over patent royalties, with the Finnish handset maker landing its first counter-punch. The Finnish company has responded to theÂ patent infringement lawsuit filed by QualcommÂ in the Western District of Wisconsin on April 2 by claiming that its products aren't infringing, and filing its first patent counter-suit against the U.S. chip company, Nokia said Thursday. Nokia's suit seeks damages and also an injunction against certain of Qualcomm's chip sets. "We're confident that our products don't infringe the two Qualcomm patents that are in suit and, in fact, we believe these patents are invalid," a Nokia spokeswoman said. The initial lawsuit filed by Qualcomm in Wisconsin concerns two patents covering speech encoders used in certain GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) mobile phones to digitize audio signals for transmission. In its counter-suit,Â Nokia accuses Qualcomm of infringingÂ six of its patents, relating primarily to multiband and multimode technologies that reduce handset and chip set size, cost, and power consumption. Standards bodies divide patents touching on 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. The six patents Nokia accuses Qualcomm of infringing are implementation patents, the spokeswoman said. Companies with essential patents included in a standard agree to license the technology under fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms, but the companies can decide whether or not to license implementation patents to others, she said. Qualcomm had no agreement to use the six Nokia implementation patents, she said. Qualcomm has copied these innovations and made them available to its chip set customers, according to the Nokia spokeswoman. In April, Qualcomm filed another lawsuit against Nokia in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. The separate lawsuit deals with three patents related to the downloading of applications and other digital content over GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) or EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution) networks, two technologies for speeding the transmission of packet data in GSM networks. The Nokia spokeswoman declined to comment on the Texas lawsuit. Over the past 19 months, Qualcomm has filed 11 patent litigation cases against Nokia but in none of these cases has the company had any success, according to the spokeswoman. Legal disputes over mobile phone patents have grown in recent years, largely because of opportunities to generate significant revenue from licensing inventions to others. Numerous patent licensing disputes have accompanied mobile phone technologies such as GSM and WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access), and are expected to flow from 4G (fourth-generation) systems now under development. In a interviewÂ earlier this month, Bill Davidson, senior vice president of investor relations and international marketing at Qualcomm, said the company has more than 1,000 essential patents for OFDM, OFDMA (OFDM Access) and MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) technologies, all of which form the foundation of new 4G technologies, whether WiMax, LTE (Long-Term Evolution) or UMB (Ultra Mobile Broadband). Â
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Vonage and AT&T finalize a deal in their patent infringement case.
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By Kevin J. O'Brien  The Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia, locked in a multimillion- dollar patent dispute with the U.S. chip maker Qualcomm, said Thursday that it had sued its adversary in U.S.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft presented oral arguments Wednesday before the U.S. Supreme Court in a 6-year-old patent lawsuit filed by AT&T whose outcome could require U.S. software companies to pay fines for patent-infringing software assembled in other countries. At issue in the case is how the court will interpret an obscure section of U.S. patent law, Section 271F, which says that if a U.S. company makes product components in the U.S and supplies them to companies overseas -- and the products assembled from those components result in patent infringements -- the company must pay patent damages for products assembled overseas as well as those made stateside. AT&T originally filed the case in federal court in New York in 2001 claiming that Microsoft infringed on one of its patents for digitally coding and decoding speech in its Windows OS. AT&T set out to recover damages not only from copies of Windows manufactured in the U.S., but also those made in other countries from the master disk of Windows that was sent to those countries and used to assemble computers with the OS installed. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in July 2005 upheld a lower-court ruling that Microsoft is liable to pay fines for foreign sales of patent-infringing software even if it was originally created in the U.S. In court Wednesday, Former U.S. Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, an attorney with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, argued Microsoft's case, which claims that the patent law was aimed at closing a loophole that allowed companies to manufacture all of the components of patented inventions in the U.S., but avoid patent liability by assembling those U.S.-made components in other countries. "We believe this law was applied improperly by the lower court to find liability based solely on computers manufactured overseas," Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith said in a statement. "A U.S. patent was never meant to apply to conduct that takes place entirely abroad." Therefore, Microsoft is asking that the Surpeme Court reverse the lower-court ruling. In a statement, Abha Divine, president and CEO of AT&T Knowledge Ventures, said the company believes that all U.S.-based sources of innovation, including the software development community, can benefit from patent laws that allow for "appropriate and fair" protection of all new inventions and technologies. The outcome of the case will depend on how the Supreme Court interprets the words "components" and "supplies" in the law, said John E. Daniel, partner in law firm Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel's Intellectual Property Department in New York. "Some people have a concern that [the lower court ruling] seems to be beyond what was intended," he said. "When [Congress] passed the legislation,Â it was thinking of making physical components, not software. The comeback is, 'What's the difference?' You still make copies, and Microsoft makes money based on people selling those copies." Microsoft has had some unusual allies in this case, such as its former nemesis the U.S. government and competitor Yahoo, both of whom have filed briefs in support of the vendor's argument. Companies fear that a precedent may be set that will potentially cost U.S. software companies millions of dollars in fines. There is also a concern that U.S. companies will take their research and development offshore to avoid fines, Daniel said.
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Nokia Oyj (NOK1V.HE), the world&#39;s top  mobile phone maker, filed a patent counter-suit against  Qualcomm Inc  in a Texas court seeking damages and an  injunction against the U.S. chip maker.
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Microsoft is fighting a rejection by US patent authorities of a patent for its FAT filesystem, the company said on Thursday. Meanwhile, it&#39;s celebrating a jury decision clearing it of patent infringement charges
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USA Video Technology Corp., a small  technology firm that holds patents for the digital delivery of  media, said on Thursday it has filed a suit against top U.S.  cable operators over their video-on-demand services.
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Microsoft Corp. presented oral arguments Wednesday before the U.S. Supreme Court in a 6-year-old patent lawsuit filed by AT&amp;T Inc. whose outcome could require U.S. software companies to pay fines for patent-infringing software assembled in other countries.
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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.