"Virtually all" Apple devices infringe our patents, says Nokia

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 30 December 2009 05:28

IT Industry - Strategy

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."

Meanwhile, Apple has retaliated to Nokia's October patent suit with one of its own. It announced on December 11 that it had filed a countersuit claiming that Nokia was infringing 13 Apple patents. Bruce Sewell, Apple's general counsel and senior vice president, said: "Other companies must compete with us by inventing their own technologies, not just by stealing ours." No other details were given.

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.