By : The China Post
Source : http://www.chinapost.com.tw
Category : Patent News
TAIPEI -- Finland-based smartphone vendor Nokia has filed a series of lawsuits in the United States and Germany against its Taiwanese rival HTC Corp. and two other companies for patent infringement. In a statement published on its website Wednesday, Nokia said it has filed a complaint with the United States International Trade Commission against HTC and has instituted litigations with the Federal District Court of Delaware in the U.S. against the Taiwanese firm and U.S.-based Viewsonic Corp.
In addition, it has sued HTC and Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM) of Canada in the Regional Court of Dusseldorf in Germany, as well as filing against all three companies in the regional courts of Mannheim and Munich, also in Germany.
According to Nokia, the litigations involve a total of 45 patent infringements by the companies named in the lawsuits.
The smartphone maker said some of the patents listed in the legal actions pertain to hardware capabilities such as dual function antennas, power management and multimode ratios.
It said other technology patents asserted in the litigations are related to enhanced software features, including application stores, multitasking, navigation, conversational message display, dynamic menus, data encryption and retrieval of email attachments on mobile devices.
“Many of these inventions are fundamental to Nokia products,” Nokia's chief legal officer, Louise Pentland, said in the statement.
“We'd rather other companies respect our intellectual property and compete using their own innovations, but as these actions show, we will not tolerate the unauthorized use of our inventions,” Pentland said.
Nokia has already licensed its patents to more than 40 companies, she went on.
The executive added that although the company prefers to avoid litigations, it had no choice but to file the lawsuits to end the unauthorized use of its proprietary innovations.
According to a recent report released by market advisory firm International Data Corp., Nokia is ranked as the third-largest smart phone vendor, with an 8.2 percent market share in the first quarter of this year, behind Samsung Electronics with 29.1 percent and Apple with 24.2 percent.
HTC took fifth place with a 4.8 percent market share behind fourth-placed RIM with 6.7 percent.
Source : http://www.chinapost.com.tw/business/global-markets/2012/05/04/340002/Nokia-files.htm
