Apple will go to court against Nokia
Apple, which seems to spend a lot of time on both sides of patent infringement lawsuits, has vowed to fight hard in court against the recent major case about iPhone patents brought by Nokia.
The lawsuit from Nokia claims that Apple’s success with the iPhone has been partially due to a pricing advantage gained by not paying royalties due to the Finnish cell phone giant. A similar suit, lost by Nokia against Qualcomm recently, cost the loser billions of dollars, a hefty sum in anyone’s book. Apple announced earlier this week that it intends to defend itself vigorously in court against the Nokia claim, foreshadowing what may be an epic intellectual property rights battle, which was filed in Delaware last week.
Apple said in response, “The complaint alleges that these patents are essential to one or more of the GSM, UMTS and 802.11 wireless communication standards, and that the Company has the right to license these patents from plaintiff on fair, reasonable, and non-descriminatory (”FRAND”) terms and conditions. (The) Plaintiff seeks unspecified FRAND compensation and other relief. The Company’s response to the complaint is not yet due. The Company intends to defend the case vigorously.”
Although the suit does not specify the exact damages sought, most industry and legal analysts see a likely damages amount in the billions. Piper Jaffrey Apple expert Gene Munster has said that he believes Nokia is seeking damages equal to 1 or 2 percent of the price of the handset, an amount equal to as much as $12 per iPhone sold according to an AppleInsider story. The patents over which Nokia is suing are extensive, covering GSM, 3G and Wi-Fi, and cover wireless data, speech coding, security and encryption.
Apple is currently involved in almost fifty lawsuits involving patent and copyright infringement. The world is a litigious place, especially in the area of intellectual property. This is a suit that could easily last a year or more and, with a possible judgment in the billions, we are sure to be hearing a great deal about it until it is settled. One must wonder whether anyone is seriously interested in shooting it out in the marketplace any more when it is so easy to just hire attorneys and duke it out in court.
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