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"These patented technologies are important to Nokia's success as they allow better user experience, lower manufacturing costs, smaller size and longer battery life for Nokia products," Nokia claims. It has provided no information on the specific patents concerned.
The move follows Nokia in October filing a complaint against Apple with the Federal District Court in Delaware alleging that Apple's iPhone infringed 10 Nokia patents for GSM, UMTS and wireless LAN standards.
Nokia said: "The ten patents...relate to technologies fundamental to making devices which are compatible with one or more of the GSM, UMTS (3G WCDMA) and wireless LAN standards. The patents cover wireless data, speech coding, security and encryption and are infringed by all Apple iPhone models shipped since the iPhone was introduced in 2007."
Nokia said that these patents had been declared essential to industry standards and that it had already successfully entered into license agreements for them with approximately 40 companies, including "virtually all the leading mobile device vendors."
According to Ilkka Rahnasto, vice president, legal & intellectual property at Nokia, "The basic principle in the mobile industry is that those companies who contribute in technology development to establish standards create intellectual property, which others then need to compensate for. Apple is also expected to follow this principle. By refusing to agree appropriate terms for Nokia's intellectual property, Apple is attempting to get a free ride on the back of Nokia's innovation."
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The company sounded a different note when it announced filing of its latest complaint with the USITC, although the distinction appears to be rather subtle. Paul Melin, general manager, patent licensing at Nokia, said: "While our litigation in Delaware is about Apple's attempt to free-ride on the back of Nokia investment in wireless standards, the ITC case filed today is about Apple's practice of building its business on Nokia's proprietary innovation."
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Sewell recently joined Apple from Intel and according to Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group (quoted by Scitech Today.com) "He was famous for much of the time he was at Intel for being aggressively combative with litigation. Intel was one of the few companies through most of the '90s that used litigation as an effective offensive weapon. Apple has the equivalent of a five-star litigation general on their side."
Nokia, however is no stranger to patent litigation and with Apple increasingly threatening Nokia's dominance of the mobile handset market the stakes are enormous.
Nokia has given no indication of why it used the courts in the first instance and the USITC in the second. According to its web site, the USITC is an independent, quasijudicial Federal agency with broad investigative responsibilities on matters of trade. If it finds against Apple it is able to prohibit the import into and sale in the US of Apple products that rely on infringed Nokia patents (Apple products are manufactured outside the US).
The USITC is not a court: its administrative law judges conduct trial-type official administrative hearings, and decisions are generally reached much more quickly than in court proceedings.
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