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Apple Counter-Sues Nokia Over Patents
adeelarshad82 writes "About two months ago Nokia sued Apple for infringing Nokia patents in its iPhone. The 10 patents in the lawsuit, filed in the US state of Delaware, relate to technologies fundamental for devices using GSM, UMTS and/or local area network (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. In the latest development to the case, Apple said Friday that it had filed its own suit against Nokia, countering Nokia's claims of patent infringement with its own."
Let's just put the CEO from both companies into a ring and have them fight it out. Whoever wins gets everything including the black turtleneck!
You fight like a dairy farmer!
Apple is complaining that Nokia isn't offering the Standards based cell phones on Reasonable and Nondiscriminatory basis? Isn't Nokia required to do that as part of submitting those patents as part of the GSM standard. It stated that in the lawsuit that nokia wanted a patent cross-license agreement with apple for the rights to the GSM patents. That's not reasonable and nondiscriminatory.
"I'm a Genius!"*
*Not an actual Genius
You fight like a dairy farmer!
How appropriate, you fight like a cow.
Expect both cases to be dropped and an announcement of mutual licensing between the two companies in ... about three or four weeks.
A classic example of patents being used defensively by Apple to counter Nokia's offensive use.
Digital Daily has posted a list of the patents at issue here and the full text of Apple's counterclaims -- which are pretty brutal. "Excerpt: In 2007, Apple introduced the iPhone a ground-breaking device that allowed users access to the functionality of the already popular iPod on a revolutionary mobile phone and Internet device. The iPhone is a converged device that allows users to access and ever expanding set of software features to take and send pictures, play music, play games do research, serve as a GPS device and much more.The iPhone platform has caused a revolutionary change in the mobile phone category.
In contrast, Nokia made a different business decision and remained focused on traditional mobile wireless handsets with conventional user interfaces. As a result, Nokia has rapidly lost share in the market for high-end mobile phones. Nokia has admitted that, as a result of the iPhone launch, “the market changed suddenly and [Nokia was] not fast enough changing with it.
In response, Nokia chose to copy the iPhone, especially its enormously popular and patented design and user interface."
And Apple sues Nokia for what? The process for creating black shiny things?
Deleted
Not really. Apple has only been in the cell phone business for a few years... Nokia is a granddaddy. If you look at the patents Apple is saying that Nokia is infringing, they're comparatively minor. Let's look at the patents...
No. 5,555,369: Method of creating packages for a pointer-based computer system
No. 6,239,795 B1: Pattern and color abstraction in a graphical user interface
No. 5,315,703: Object-oriented notification framework system
No. 6,189,034 B1: Method and apparatus for dynamic launching of a teleconferencing application upon receipt of a call
No. 7,469,381, B2: List scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touch-screen display
No. RE 39, 486 E: Extensible, replaceable network component system
No. 5,455,854: Object-oriented telephony system
No. 5, 379,431: Boot framework architecture for dynamic staged initial program load
No. 5,634,074 : Serial I/O device identifies itself to a computer through a serial interface during power on reset then it is being configured by the computer
No. 5,915,131 : Method and apparatus for handling I/O requests utilizing separate programming interfaces to access separate I/O services
No. 7,383,453 B2: Conserving power by reducing voltage supplied to an instruction-processing portion of a processor
No. 5,848,105: GMSK signal processors for improved communications capacity and quality
No. 6,343,263 B1 : Real-time signal processing system for serially transmitted data
Mostly we're talking fluffy software patents. The last few are potentially meaty, but given how little time Apple has been in this business, and how recent these were filed and granted, they're probably pretty specific (although I don't have the time to pick through the actual claims). Worst case scenario for Nokia is probably, they pull their smartphones from the US market for 6 months while they work around them. And the US smartphone market is a minor part of Nokia's business.
But Nokia... Nokia has patents on just about every wireless technology known to man. Worst case scenario for Apple is they can cancel the iPhone and put an ethernet jack in the next MacBook Air.
Here's a crazy idea: in-house lawyers.
Do you know how hard it is to potty train a lawyer?! It's not like a dog or better a cat that makes a bee line for the litter box. Nooooooo!
Lawyers need a big office if they don't have one, they'll shit all over everything. They need an expensive car or they'll pee over everything. And as for food! Oh God!
Just gimme a cat.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
What's Apple supposed to do? Just eventually lose the patent case and pay up? The MAD patent defense is considered one of the "necessary evils" of the tech world.
When someone punches you, you punch back. Even if your principal is one of those idiots who, instead of trying to find out who thew the first punch, or who provoked who, just suspends both students.
> When someone punches you, you punch back.
I think you're kind of missing the point. We shouldn't be behaving like cave-men in the first place.
True, the corporate environment that all companies currently exist in tends to encourage this behavior. But the nature of this corporate environment is hurting everyone (except the lawyers), so how long will it be before we can all evolve and pursue better things?
Reminds me of an anecdote concerning the game Mule. I played this game with my brothers, and we always competed against each other. When I mentioned the game to a friend of mine, she said "That's a great game. What was the richest your colony ever got?" I responded with some score I remembered at the time. She said something to the effect of "Why so low? We usually got 10x that!" It had not even occurred to me that one might try to play the game cooperatively, thus benefiting the colony as a whole, rather than the individual player.
Somehow, mankind as a whole needs to make a similar observation.
Apple is not doing this "because someone sued them". Apple made it clear that they were out to block Nokia from touch screen phones:
Nonsense. Nokia *has* touch screen phones. Apple did not sue them.
Apple has been building up for a patent war
Defensively, as evidenced by the fact that they did not sue first.
Nokia has no choice other than to strike before their N900 phones make them vulnerable.
That doesn't make any sense. How does initiating a suit about completely different technologies change anything with regards to touch screen patents? Nokia did not stave off a suit by their preemptive strike. In fact, they *brought it about*.
Remember Apple's lawsuit happy history was what caused the League for Programming Freedom.
Uh, that's a suit from twenty years ago, and one in which their partner (Microsoft) took proprietary knowledge from Apple to create a copy of their prized OS. This wasn't some sort of patent-troll style suit.
I guess the fact that so many seem to believe that Nokia is the agressor here
Because *they are*. They struck first. How is that so difficult?
(remember, they've been trying to Negotiate for years before this suit came out)
So, again, Nokia went after Apple first?
really does show that Apple can distort reality.
Those clever Apple folks! They can distort reality so completely that it wraps completely around on itself to where it started. Nokia struck first. Apple has been able to twist things so thoroughly that it even *looks* like Nokia struck first. Astounding!
Apparently some people get the opposite effect from Jobs' reality distortion field. Let's see here...
Mach: It's open source. So long as Apple abides by the license (which they do), there is no possible way they can "steal" it.
Objective-C: Apple is far from the only ones to have an Obj-C language. And the funny thing is that NeXT was the first company to license it, which Apple later purchased. Yep, obtaining a license certainly equates to theft!
MP3 Players: Are you fucking serious? Apple was far from the first to make an MP3 player. They were simply the most successful. Holy crap, Sony ripped off the inventor of the wax cylinder by making the Walkman!
Multitouch: Apple purchased Fingerworks, who had developed a number of multitouch technologies and interfaces. Again, buying is stealing?
The App Store: You can't possibly be fucking serious.
Song recommendations: See above. You mean they can recommend something based on something else you bought? WOW, they stole that...from the rest of the ENTIRE FUCKING INDUSTRY.
Phone cameras: Holy. Fucking. Shit. I'm not even going to address this.
Words cannot describe just how incredibly stupid you really are.
You do realize that those are Apple's patents, right? Nokia actually holds patents on nearly every wireless technology known to man.
You mean the lawsuit that Microsoft won, by proving that their product was built differently from Apple's and did not duplicate or resemble any Apple code?
Your memory is a bit fuzzy there. Microsoft won that suit because the license Sculley gave them, which was supposed to permit them to use Apple's IP for products that Microsoft shipped on the Mac was poorly worded, and didn't restrict them from using Apple's IP anywhere else.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Uh, no. Apple /purchased/ what they got from Xerox with stock.
It's kind of time this urban myth died.