Qualcomm, which develops technology used in mobile phones, has experienced another major setback after Nokia filed a second lawsuit pertaining to patent infringement counter-suit against the Californian company. Nokia, combating a nearly two-year-old royalty dispute with Qualcomm, filed suit on Friday in US District Court in Beaumont, Texas. Nokia in its complaints accused Qualcomm of unlawfully copying six of its patents for mobile downloading of software applications and for mobile television broadcasts. The Nokia lawsuit comes at a time when San Diego based Qualcomm and an early trendsetter of digital mobile technology, involved in maintaining the importance of patents, which now help generating a third of its total revenue, as well as guard itself against allegations by rivals of patent infringement.
A legal dispute between the two companies has unrelenting since part of a cross-licensing deal over technology patents expired on April 9, and their increasingly intense battle is upsetting investors and the industry on both sides of the Atlantic. On May 29, a US jury in California had ruled that Qualcomm has violated three patents of a rival, Broadcom. Later on, the US International Trade Commission had barred imports of newly designed mobile phones using the disputed technology. Qualcomm, on the other side, has filed 11 patent infringement lawsuits against Nokia in less than two years, looking for damages and sanctions; however, it has not achieved success so far in any case filed by it. Last month Nokia filed its first counter-suit against Qualcomm, in Wisconsin, and connected to chipset technologies.
The legal dispute between these telecom giants revolves around Nokia’s employment of Qualcomm patents for high-speed 3G wireless technologies, although it also has an impact on Qualcomm’s chips business, which Nokia alleges uses many Nokia-patented technologies. Analysts speculate that Nokia has paid Qualcomm around $500 million per year and now it wants to reduce this cost. Nokia has said that its patent portfolio is much stronger now than 15 years back, when the original cross-licensing deal was signed.
Speaking over the issue Tero Ojanpera, Nokia’s chief technology officer has stated, ‘we see Qualcomm has copied our technology without compensating us, so we need to enforce our technologies and patents we have.’ Nokia in addition remarked on a lawsuit filed by Qualcomm in Texas on April 2 and saying, it remains confident that its products do not infringe any of three Qualcomm patents and that the patents are invalid. The company in its official; communique said, ‘Nokia is confident that the Qualcomm patents are invalid, for example, based on the alleged inventions having been patented or published by other companies, including Nokia, before Qualcomm.’
Experts have said that Qualcomm, in both the Broadcom and Nokia cases, seems to be on the defensive, struggling to defend patents that were mainly associated to an earlier generation of digital mobile telephony. They further argue that not only Nokia but also a number of other firms are taking offense at Qualcomm’s royalty demands.
