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Category: WTO Sub-category: Intellectual Property
Document type: news
Finland's Nokia and Taiwan's HTC won a key European ruling against a patent of the German firm IPCom, which has been threatening the sales of their phones in Germany.
The European Patent Office's decision was a rare spot of good news for Nokia, which is struggling with dwindling sales and credit rating downgrades in recent weeks.
Intellectual property licensor IPCom had initiated a ban on the two smartphone makers' handsets after they refused to meet its terms.
Moreover, several top phone makers have signed a licensing deal with IPCom, but HTC and Nokia are the only ones to have challenged IPCom's patents in courts across Europe.
The dispute centred on rights to a wireless technology developed by Bosch for a car telephone system, which is subsequently sold in 2007.
IPCom first challenged HTC in the German courts in 2009 and won. HTC appealed, but later dropped the case just as it was about to come to court last year.
IPCom then subsequently wrote to retailers and wholesalers demanding to stop selling HTC's 3G devices and threatening to sue if they refused.
Recently, it also scored a legal victory against Nokia when a German court ruled that the Finnish firm had also infringed IPCom's intellectual property.
Those legal victories, however, appear to have had the rug pulled from beneath them with the European Patent Office's judgment.
Nokia, unsurprisingly, welcomed the decision.
IPCom said it would appeal the EPO's ruling.
However, the patent will remain in effect until the EPO has made a final decision on this appeal.
According to IPCom, as patent '100A' currently remains in effect, the present ruling has no impact on the already-initiated cease and desist orders against HTC.
However, the experts do not expect this conflict to be resolved anytime soon, as an appeal could stretch out over years rather than months.
External links:
Nokia Corporation is a Finnish multinational communications corporation headquartered in Keilaniemi, Espoo, a city neighbouring Helsinki. It manufactures mobile electronic devices, mostly mobile telephones and other devices related to communications, and converges internet and communications industries.
HTC Corporation, formerly High Tech Computer Corporation, is a Taiwanese manufacturer of smartphones and tablets. The company initially made smartphones based mostly on Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system (OS) software.
European Patent Office (EPO) is one of the two organs of the European Patent Organisation (EPOrg), the other being the Administrative Council. The EPO acts as an executive body for the Organisation while the Administrative Council acts as its supervisory body as well as, to a limited extent, its legislative body.
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