Apple to 'vigorously' fight Nokia patent pout
You expected capitulation?
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Apple will "vigorously" defend itself against Nokia's patent infringement suit, according to Cupertino's SEC 10-K annual-report filing (PDF) issued Tuesday.
Last Thursday, Nokia filed suit against Apple in the Delaware US District Court, alleging infringement of 10 US patents. In its SEC filing, Apple - aka "The Company" - states that "The Company’s response to the complaint is not yet due," but that "The Company intends to defend the case vigorously."
In its 30-page complaint, Nokia - which, despite recent market-share slippage still ranks as the world's largest mobile phone company - claims that "By refusing to compensate Nokia for its patented technologies, Apple is attempting to get a 'free ride' on the billions of dollars that Nokia has invested in research and development to provide the public with the wireless communications it enjoys today."
Apple's alleged "free ride" is apparently the theme of Nokia's complaint. In a statement issued along with its lawsuit filing, the Finnish phone company's VP of legal and intellectual property, Ilkka Rahnasto, paraphrased the language of the complaint, saying that "Apple is attempting to get a free ride on the back of Nokia's innovation."
Nokia's statement also notes that the company has negotiated patent licenses with "approximately 40 companies, including virtually all the leading mobile device vendors." The lawsuit claims that Nokia made "various offers" to Apple for licensing agreements for the disputed patents - both singly and in a portfolio - but that Apple rejected its offers.
The 10 patents in dispute reach back over 10 years, and although Nokia's complaint states that each patent "is essential to one of more" of the standards GSM, UTMS, and 802.11, the patents appear at first blush to range further than that - including one patent for "A backlight module for an LCD device."
The parents under dispute are the following:
- Data transmission in a radio telephone network (filed October 1996, granted September 1998)
- Method and apparatus for speech transmission in a mobile communications system (filed January 1996, granted January 1999)
- Speech synthesizer employing post-processing for enhancing the quality of the synthesized speech (filed August 1998, granted August 1999)
- Data transfer in a mobile telephone network (filed August 1998, granted March 2002)
- Measurement report transmission in a telecommunications system (filed December 1999, granted February 2004)
- Backlight module (filed September 2002, granted June 2004)
- Method of ciphering data transmission in a radio system (filed March 2000, granted April 2005)
- Integrity check in a communication system (filed October 2001, granted March 2006)
- Reporting cell measurement results in a cellular communication system (filed March 2001, granted August 2006)
- System for ensuring encrypted communication after handover (filed November 2001, granted July 2008)
SEC filings require at least a modicum of even-handedness, and so Apple admits in its 10-K that "Because of technological changes...it is possible that certain components of the Company’s products and business methods may unknowingly infringe the patents or other intellectual property rights of third parties."
The filing continues: "Regardless of merit, responding to such claims can consume significant time and expense." And Apple's legal team is certainly expending a lot of time and expense defending itself. As the filing notes, "At present, the Company is vigorously defending more than 47 patent infringement cases, 27 of which were filed during fiscal 2009."
Legal wrangling over a single disputed patent can be a multi-year affair, as lawyers for each party explore the nooks and crannies of each clause, paragraph, and patent illustration. With Apple committed to "defend the case vigorously," don't expect this complex case to be decided - or settled out of court - until well into the next decade. ®
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COMMENTS
old pcs
<<<<tell me how many ppl keep their pc's for more than 3 years in active service?" #
By Fatty Treats Posted Tuesday 3rd November 2009 12:52 GMT
Non windows users? It's the OS, not the hardware.>>>>
I see plenty of old (2002) XP PCs in my job and Unlike an OS X pc from that time all the latest software will install.
As OS X is now on its 6th version and most latest software expects at least 10.5 lots of mac users are left out in the cold
"tell me how many ppl keep their pc's for more than 3 years in active service?"
Non windows users? It's the OS, not the hardware.
I love that the definitive assessment of one's gadgets is now what "the washing machine delivery man" nicks.
@Will 22
On which planet do you live?
>Apple have long had form for taking standard kit, wrapping it up in a shiny box, sticking some >proprietary software in it and doubling the price. Their argument and those of the fanboys who >fork out for their shitty kit is frequently "Ooooh, but it's shiny!" or "But it just works!" Bollocks it >just works. Have a look at the latest Time Capsule woes or the Snow Leopard debacle for >stuff 'just working'.
Standard kit? Maybe, tell me how many ppl keep their pc's for more than 3 years in active service? On average, Mac's are kept twice as long. Just Works counts for most things Apple makes, but like any software firm, they make mistakes, too (but nowhere near most others, including all the 100 biggest).
I bought a Ti powerbook in late 2001, it was thinner than most laptops you can get today with the same screen size. Some bloke delivering a washing machine saw it in my lounge, next to my hifi, tv, digital video camera in 2006 and guess what he came back for? The 2001 PowerBook, not the tv, the digital video camera .... it was the only thing this guy took, a cretin? certainly, but that laptop was 5 years old and you could not even tell.
Time machine has its quirks, true, but it is sooooooo much better than nothing at all/Windows System Restore and it requires absolutely no human intervention! How do you restore a windows system that won't boot? Command line or burn an iso (not windows install cd)?
On a mac, you boot off the installation CD and get a nice gui to restore your system.
>In the other corner we have Nokia. Nokia have innovated where Apple pretended to. Nokia >were instrumental in the bringing to market of mobile phones that were affordable to nearly >everyone. They were at the forefront of the developing mobile technology and their phones >could always be relied on to have the latest features with each new iteration of the tech. It's a >much bandied-about term but Nokia kit is very frequently the 'state of the art'.
Nokia make good phones... I have not seen a phone from them I would rate as smart (and my sister has the N97), but the old black and whites were ok. When they turned to colour, they got too fragile and would usually break very quickly. As for design, well, they have yet to bring out a phone that meets my design requirements, then again, not that important.
As for Software, I think Nokia need some "developers", I do not know who created their "sync" software, but it's one of the worst pieces of crap I have come by in over 15 years in IT, the other being Canon Photo/Scanner software. (I used both, Canon for Windows and Mac and both were crap of course). I created an svg icon for their app on the Mac, out of pity, to at least make it integrate into the ui (WTF, took me 30mins).
I am on Linux mainly, though, now. Nothing to do with time machine or [Snow] Leopard, I should say, or Mac OS X, for that matter.
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