Nokia Challenges Sagem, Vitelcom on Patents
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Nokia has taken legal action against  small European handset makers Sagem and Vitelcom on allegations  of patent infringements, the world's largest mobile phone maker  said on Thursday.
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Qualcomm scored a minor victory in its continuing spat with Nokia when a judge last week recommended ending&#160;the investigation Nokia brought&#160;against it in August for infringing patents.In August, Nokia asked the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) to&#160;ban the import of Qualcomm chip sets&#160;used in cell phones, including 3G (third-generation handsets), for allegedly infringing on five patents held by Nokia.ITC Administrative Law Judge Paul Luckern granted Qualcomm a motion to terminate the investigation, as the companies are already in arbitration to settle a dispute behind a technology license the two companies signed earlier. If the decision stands after a 30-day review, Qualcomm won&#39;t be prevented from importing its chip sets into the U.S.Nokia originally requested ITC to initiate an investigation against Qualcomm for infringing patents and issue an exclusion order to bar the import of infringing Qualcomm chip sets into the U.S.For two years now, the spat between the two companies over patent licensing has led to several lawsuits.Last year,&#160;Qualcomm filed a complaint with the ITC against Nokia over GSM&#160;(Global System for Mobile Communication) patents.The ITC is already investigating Nokia after&#160;InterDigital complained that Nokia infringed&#160;two of its 3G wireless technology patents. The commission also&#160;banned some Qualcomm imports&#160;in June, after&#160;complaints from Broadcom for patent infringement.
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com. In an attempt to stay in front of increasingly vigorous competition, mobile-phone maker Nokia Corp. said it will employ a variety of strategies next year in introducing 40 different handset models.
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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.
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French phone equipment firm Alcatel sues Microsoft, accusing it of infringing seven of its patents.
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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.
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Wireless tech heads to court again, as Motorola subsidiaries Symbol and Wireless Valley claim patent infringement.
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Wireless technology company Qualcomm  Inc.  on Wednesday said it had filed a suit against  Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia (NOK1V.HE), alleging the  company had infringed on two Qualcomm patents in Britain.
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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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Nokia (NOK1V.HE), the world&#39;s top  mobile phone maker, said on Thursday it has filed its first  patent counter-suit against Qualcomm , seeking damages  and an injunction against the U.S. company&#39;s chipsets.
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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) - 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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Nokia, the world&#39;s largest mobile phone maker, took legal action earlier this week against two European manufacturers for allegedly infringing on technology patents and registered designs.
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Qualcomm and Nokia are working to resolve their long-running, expensive legal dispute.
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A judge has halted legal proceedings in one of Qualcomm Inc.'s complaints that Nokia Corp. violated its wireless-technology patents. The move came as a deadline neared for the two companies to renew a high-stakes licensing agreement.
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(InfoWorld) - The rancorous world of wireless is heating up yet again, with two subsidiaries of Motorola suing Aruba Networks, alleging the wireless LAN company infringed four patents. Symbol Technologies and Wireless Valley CommunicationsÂ charge that Aruba is knowingly using their patented WLAN switch technologies and techniques for designing and managing WLANs. On Monday, they filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware. The companies want a jury trial and are seeking a permanent injunction against Aruba as well as unspecified monetary damages, tripled because of willful infringement. The airwaves have become a dangerous place to do business, with a series of suits between Qualcomm and two of its mobile rivals,Â NokiaÂ andÂ Broadcom, following on the heels ofÂ NTP's litigation against Research In MotionÂ andÂ other companies. An Australian research body won an injunction against Buffalo Technology (USA)Â for WLAN patent infringement, and the development of the hotly anticipated IEEE 802.11n WLAN specification has also sparked fierce battles, though not in court. As in other fast-growing markets, litigants may see future riches at stake. Aruba makes a variety of WLAN equipment and technology for putting the gear together in large networks for enterprises and other customers. The company, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., is incorporated in Delaware, according to the suit. Aruba has not yet seen the suit and has no comment, spokesman Michael Tennefoss said. All of Aruba's WLAN switch, site planning, and radio-frequency management and monitoring products infringe the patents, and they have since the company began selling its first products, said Aaron Bernstein, vice president and deputy general counsel at Symbol. The companies don't want to license the technology to Aruba, but to stop the company from using it, he said. Motorola isn't suing Aruba because the patents were issued to Symbol and Wireless Valley, which are separate legal entities wholly owned by Motorola. Wireless Valley was acquired in 2005 and Symbol earlier this year. They didn't sue Aruba until now because the WLAN switch patents weren't awarded to Symbol until early this year, Bernstein said.
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'Industry bragging rights' also up for grabs The Forum Nokia Open C Challenge, which offers $20,000 in prizes for the best application developed using Nokia's Open C libraries for Series 60 programming, along with POSIX for the Symbian bits, is now open to registrations.â¦