RIM Agrees to Pay Nokia in Patent Dispute Settlement
RIM Agrees to Pay Nokia in Patent Dispute Settlement by UCStrategies Staff
Research In Motion (RIM) and the Finnish mobile phone manufacturer, Nokia, reached a new patent-licensing agreement. Nokia dropped litigation against the BlackBerry maker, retracting complaints filed with courts in Canada, United Kingdom, and the United States on November 29.
The settlement agreement included a one-time payment in the fourth quarter plus ongoing fees to be paid by RIM. The terms of the deal remained confidential. The agreement reached with RIM completely settled all patent litigation between the two companies, but Nokia added that its similar legal disputes with HTC and ViewSonic were still underway.
The patents that Nokia alleged RIM to have contravened involved the 802.11 wireless LAN technology.
It was expected that RIM would respond to Nokia’s threat of litigation before the launch of BlackBerry 10 on January 30, 2013. RIM announced on December 20 that its smartphone sales for its fiscal 2013 third quarter had dropped 47 percent from the same quarter in 2012. And BlackBerry 10 was the mobile platform that RIM was hoping to help turn the company around.
“Research In Motion has worked hard to develop its leading-edge BlackBerry technology and has build an industry-leading intellectual-property portfolio of its own,” a spokesperson from RIM told eWEEK on November 28. “RIM will respond to Nokia’s petitions in due course.”
Over the past two decades, Nokia has invested around $60 billion in mobile R&D. That has catapulted the Finland-based company, alongside Ericsson and Qualcomm, as one of the industry’s top patent holders.
Nokia has been having problems with plummeting sales. In October, Nokia announced a $990 million convertible bond and posted a third-quarter deficit of $1.3 billion. However, the company earns around $659 million from patent royalties in its mobile telephony intellectual-property portfolio, which is considered to be one of the largest in the industry. According to some analysts, if Nokia can successfully negotiate with more companies, it could possibly take home hundreds of millions more from patent royalties alone. And the filing of legal disputes against RIM and other companies may be viewed as Nokia’s attempt to exploit the company’s legacy to ensure its survival, while trying to recover its smartphone market share against Apple and Samsung.
“We are very pleased to have resolved our patent-licensing issues with RIM and reached this new agreement, while maintaining Nokia’s ability to protect our unique product differentiation,” said Paul Melin, chief intellectual-property officer at Nokia, in a press release. “This agreement demonstrates Nokia's industry-leading patent portfolio and enables us to focus on further licensing opportunities in the mobile communications market.” (KOM) Link. Link.