Nokia and Apple are on a war footing again, each accusing having infringed the other’s patent, harking back to the days when it had fought a bitter patent war almost half a decade back. In the present scenario, Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent are claiming Apple to have infringed on at least 32 patents prompting them to file lawsuits in Germany and the US against the Cupertino company.
The above can also be considered as a countermeasure to Apple’s filing of an antitrust lawsuit against Nokia wherein it accused the Finnish company of handing over a huge number of patents to what it claims to be patent assertion companies such as Acacia.
“Nokia and those PAEs have thereby increased market power and created or enhanced monopoly power associated with those patents,” Apple accused Nokia in the lawsuit.
Nokia is claiming that every iPhone version since the iPhone 3G till the present model has been using technologies it developed. The iPad Pro along with all versions of the iPad Air and iPad Mini along with Apple Watch and Apple TV too come under the purview of the patent litigation. That is not all as Nokia said they also have issues with services like Find My iPhone or Find My iPad.
Nokia further clarified that the disputed patents cover those that range from the display, antenna, and chipset. Among the software bits that find mention in the lawsuit include the user interface, video encoding and such. Nokia filed the lawsuits in courts in Dusseldorf, Mannheim and Munich, Germany, and the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.
Almost all patents are owned by Nokia though Lucent Technologies could own at least one of the patents. Nokia had acquired Alcatel-Lucent in 2015.
Also, as has already been stated, this isn’t the first time Apple is meeting Nokia in the courts, having already been involved in a bitter feud back in 2009. Back then, the case had lingered on till 2011 when Apple had opted for a settlement in a deal that is estimated to have cost Apple several hundred million dollars.
Interestingly, that was also the time when Apple had also been engaged in another patent dispute with Samsung, something that continues to be fought to this day.
