Nokia, Qualcomm in patent royalty fight again

Patent royalties are making Nokia Corp. and Qualcomm Inc fight yet again. The two companies have reportedly started a new round of war in this regard.

Responding to the patent infringement lawsuit filed by Qualcomm, in the Western District of Wisconsin on April 2, claiming that its products aren't infringing, and filing its first patent counter-suit against the U.S. chip company, Nokia’s suit seeks damages and also an injunction against certain of Qualcomm's chipsets. According to the Finnish company, its products don't infringe the two Qualcomm patents that are in suit. The company believes that these patents are invalid, said a Nokia official.

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. The counter-suit by Nokia accuses Qualcomm of infringing six of its patents, relating primarily to multiband and multimode technologies that reduce handset and chipset size, cost, and power consumption. The six patents Nokia accuses Qualcomm of infringing are implementation patents.

According to the Nokia official, firms 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. Qualcomm had no agreement to use the six Nokia implementation patents, it was pointed out.

Nokia has accused Qualcomm to have copied its innovations and made them available to its chipset customers.

Significantly, Qualcomm had, in April 2007, filed another lawsuit against Nokia in the US 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.

It has been a real fight, considering that over the past 19 months, Qualcomm has filed 11 patent litigation cases against Nokia. However, according to Nokia, none of these cases saw Qualcomm reap any success.