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Apple Agrees To Pay Licensing Fees To Nokia
dkd903 writes "After almost two years of litigation of Nokia and Apple suing and counter-suing each other, the patent war between the two companies has come to an end. The winner of this settlement is, however, Nokia. As a part of the settlement, Apple has agreed to become a licensee of Nokia's patents. As a part of the licensing agreement, Apple has agreed to give Nokia a one-time payment and ongoing royalties. The exact terms of the agreement have not been disclosed."
Yes. It's never been a question whether Apple needed to license the patents. The sticking point has always been the terms. Normally these licenses involve some sort of cross licensing. I think Apple originally objected to the specific patents that Nokia wanted from them as they felt the patents were not cell phone patents but patents to their other technology. Frankly Apple didn't have a lot of cell phone patents so they didn't have many to offer. So Nokia then raised the licensing cost if they were not getting the patents they wanted. Apple objected to that.
Since we don't know the terms, we can't speculate how it was settled. There are two factors that may come into play. (1) Nokia is in a bit of trouble right now; they need to focus on their business and not a resource draining litigation where in the end only the lawyers may win. (2)Apple bought 200 patents from Freescale (former Motorola semiconductor division). So Apple now has patents to offer in cross licensing.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Apple have been fighting all along to pay royalties. Nokia wanted Apple to hand-over some of their patents relating to mobile 'phones but Apple refused.
Apple got what they wanted, not Nokia.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
I humbly disagree. I am European, and i can say, that although Nokia was never "bad", they didn't always have the "tech" hardware, or software, their price tags warrented.
I have owned, or had access to a huge variaty of phones from 1997, to present, including the Nokia 8110 ( the Matrix phone), 6150, 6210, 8210, Ericsson T68, T610, P800, S700, K800, N95, Moto v3i, and many other brands, including HTC, and Apple.
Take the early days (1995 - 1996) when i first got my mobile phone. Of the "big three", Nokia Ericsson and Motorola. Moto was known for "cheaper" but relatively solid, if basic phones. Nokia's flagship was the 2110, and Ericsson had the EH337. The Ericsson phone was by far better build quality, was more robust, had more "features".
Nokia then brought out the 8110 in 1996 (the same phone that later appeared in the Matrix) and that phone pushed Nokia into the market due to its style, and "number of ringtones". However, the phone was not as well built as Ericsson, and arguably lacked many key features (keyguard, clock, etc). the Phone was a marketting success for Nokia, not nessesarily a tech one. I had one myself.
After that, Nokia improved their platform, starting with the 6110, the 2110, which launched the infamous "nokia ui" together with the prorietry Ringtones/Logos, etc. The current Series 40 is an evolution from that. Right up until 2001 with the release of Ericsson T68, Nokia had the UI experience that beat other manufacturers.
Their tech may have not always been the most advanced: indeed Others had POP email, Bluetooth, open ringtones/picture support. Nokia's first bluetooth implementations were a joke, with phones being shipped with bluetooth on and discoverable as standard, resulting in those Nokia users being easy pickings for BlueJacking. Even today, Nokias implementation of Bluetooth although a lot better than android/iphone/ and most others, are still not as good as most comparable Sony Ericsson feature phones, still not supporting multi connections. Their email support still doesnt support IMAP idle in a sane way (Sony ericssons have been supporting that since the K800i)
However the Nokia UI, and propritry customisations drove the market. The problem for nokia came when they originally released the Series 60, they wanted to emulate the Original Nokia UI as much as possible. It was argued that UIQ by Symbian was a better implementation, which would have been more "touch friendly" from the go, as it was already a pen interface.
This was what caused the huge legacy problems in the future. When I got my Nokia N95, although i was really impressed by the hardware, the tech was amazing, the software was really confusing, and long in the tooth. For example:
- Nokia still has the same T9 implementation it had on earlier phones, whereas other manufactureres have improved the technology incredibly.
- 3 different places to set varies WiFi parameters (grrr)
- disjointed settings, lack of clarity.
This was the reason Nokia messed up. IT wasnt as much that the Apple iphone touch interface was soo "good", whcih admittedly it was, it was more the case that Series 60 became so "bad", and apple just polished up.
Have a nice day!