New Patent Suit Threatens Bluetooth Standard

Aditi.Tuteja writes "A U.S. research institute has sued Nokia, Samsung Electronics and Matsushita-owned Panasonic for violating a patent on Bluetooth technology, potentially putting the free wireless standard at risk. The Washington Research Foundation, which markets technology from the University of Washington, is seeking damages from the three mobile-phone makers for using a radio frequency receiver technology without paying royalties. From the article: 'According to the lawsuit, Bluetooth-based computers, cell phones and headsets made by the companies have violated four patents for research done in the mid-1990s by Edwin Suominen when he was a student at the University of Washington. All four patents are now licensed by the Washington Research Foundation. The foundation's lead counsel on the case, Steven Lisa, said the court filing followed two years of informal attempts to resolve the issue with the major players in the industry.'"

Comments

What exactly does it threaten?

[aslvrstn]

I was under the impression that Bluetooth was an open standard, and it looks like the suits involve specific chipsets used by the companies in question, not the standard as a whole.

The guy is a patent agent

[hughk]

If you google him, you will find that Edwin Suominen is a patent agent who studied RF at university and assigned some patents there. Despite his name (Suominen), he doesn't seem to have any Finnish connection (Suomi, is the Finnish name for themselves). I had wondered at first whether he had any connection to another well known Finnish company which was heavily involved in the original research. What is unusual is that he seems to have acquired a number of patents (about 4) whilst studying as an undergraduate at University.

The thing is that the original BT work done in Finland/Sweden (mostly the latter) was done some time ago. It has taken a very long time to catch on in the US but started appearing in the mid nineties. Simple implementations appeared a little later and it may be interesting to look at the history of this patent against when the first single chip implmentation appeared (about 98). It could well be that some existing technology leaked.

Re:The guy is a patent agent

[Chainsaw]

An interesting thing to note here... The Bluetooth standard was developed by Ericsson, the swedish company that manufactures mobile phones and phone switching systems. They also have the most complete and reliable Bluetooth implementation in their phones. However, they are NOT listed as one of the companies being sued.

Re:The guy is a patent agent

[kitgerrits]

You are indeed correct, except for a few details: (from Wikipedia:) The Bluetooth specification was first developed in 1994 by Sven Mattisson and Jaap Haartsen, who were working for Ericsson Mobile Platforms in Lund, Sweden at the time[1]. ... (the Bluetooth consortium) was established by Ericsson, Sony Ericsson, IBM, Intel, Toshiba and Nokia, and later joined by many other companies as Associate or Adopter members What's most surprising is, that one of the founding members has stop developing a while ago: But, back to the story at hand: Suominem had 4 patents on implementations of bluetooth protocols People are still allowed to develop their own bluetooth hardware and software, but if they want to use existing systems, they'll have to pay the license fees for those patents. (kinda like licensing the Quake Engine to make Half-life, before the engine went OSS) Broadcomm bought a license, but Nokia did not. (They probably decided they would code their own, then failed)