Greed or exasperation? Nokia sues Apple over mobile patents

In a move that has caused genuine amazement world-wide, Nokia is suing Apple – claiming that the creator of the iPhone has infringed 10 of Nokia’s patents. The Finnish mobile maker could not have gotten the timing worse. A week ago, Nokia reported massive losses for this quarter – and less than a week later, Apple posted over $1.5 billion in profit. Filing the law suit now has pretty much guaranteed that, no matter how good its real reasons, Nokia’s motives will be seen as greed and sour grapes.

What’s going on, exactly?

In a US federal district court in Delaware, Nokia has filed a law suit against Apple for violating patents. Nokia claims the 10 patents cover several aspects of wireless devices that Apple has capitalised on with the iPhone, including data, speech coding, security and encryption.

Nokia claims that it has been in discussions with Apple for over a year now concerning these patents. Evidently those discussions didn’t turn out how Nokia wanted.

The patents are all related to 2G, 3G or wireless LAN technology. For completeness sake, here’s the full list (from ZDnet):

- Data transmission in a radio telephone network
- Data transfer in a mobile telephone network
- Measurement report transmission in a telecommunications system
- Access channel for reduced access delay in a telecommunications system
- Reporting cell measurement results in a cellular communication system
- Method and apparatus for speech transmission in a mobile communications system
- Speech synthesizer employing post-processing for enhancing the quality of the synthesized speech
- Method of ciphering data transmission in a radio system
- Integrity check in a communication system
- System for ensuring encrypted communication after handover

From the Nokia statement:

Ilkka Rahnasto, Vice President, Legal & Intellectual Property at Nokia: “The basic principle in the mobile industry is that those companies who contribute in technology development to establish standards create intellectual property, which others then need to compensate for. Apple is also expected to follow this principle. By refusing to agree appropriate terms for Nokia’s intellectual property, Apple is attempting to get a free ride on the back of Nokia’s innovation.”

What we think?

The tone of Nokia’s press release about this event is one of exhausted patience. It references 20 years of R&D into mobile technologies, which has cost Nokia almost $60 billion. It talks about the 40 other companies with which Nokia has had no problems licensing its technology, including “virtually all the leading mobile device vendors”. The tale that Nokia spins is one of an exasperated company just trying to reap the benefit of its two decades of hard work.

But is that the truth? By kicking off this case now, Nokia has irredeemably tarred the entire proceeding. Maybe there would never be a good time to sue Apple (especially considering that everyone seems to be taking their shots at Apple now), but now is about the worst time I can think of. We can only hope that we’ll glimpse some of the truth of the matter as the case proceeds. If Nokia and Apple continue this publicly, that is, and the whole thing isn’t kept completely under legal wrapping. I can’t help think that Nokia has crossed a line here that it will regret crossing. Even if this case works out in Nokia’s favour, it has done something that you almost never see. Honestly, when’s the last time you remember a high-profile legal case between two mobile companies of the same stature as Nokia and Apple? It’s just not something that these companies do… publicly. I’m sure that many legal disputes like this have been settled between huge mobile companies, without the press or the public being any the wiser. Nokia has made a very public battle here, and by doing so has made itself look like the desperate Old Turk fighting for survival. I feel that Apple is going to come out of this looking like the plucky underdog.

Well, whatever the reasons, this could almost certainly be the start of one of the most interesting mobile court cases ever seen! The global mobile industry is held together by a massively complex net of licenses, patents and intellectual property – and part of the guts of that is about to be laid bare. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t excited about this story!