Nokia said that it has filed cases in Germany
and The Netherlands arguing that Qualcomm patents have expired.
Qualcomm owns patents in technology used in products such as mobile
phones. It licenses that to manufacturers for use in chips.
Nokia claims
that patents in chipsets by Texas Instruments, which has a patent
licensing deal with Qualcomm, are invalid. If Nokia wins its cases
then Qualcomm would not be able to force a licensing deal on Nokia
in relation to Texas Instrument chips used by the handset
manufacturer.
The cases have been filed in the Regional
Court of Mannheim in Germany and the Hague District Court in The
Netherlands, according to a Nokia statement. Qualcomm has not made
a comment about the case.
Nokia has long paid Qualcomm licensing fees
but a long-running deal expires in April and the two companies are
at loggerheads over what kind of deal will replace it. The current
deal is a cross-licensing one, involving some Nokia intellectual
property as well as Qualcomm IP.
Qualcomm filed a patent infringement suit
against Nokia in autumn 2005 alleging that the company violated 11
of its patents. That suit came just a week after Nokia and five
other mobile network and chip companies complained to the European
Commission about Qualcomm's licensing practices.
That complaint, which is still being
investigated, centred on allegations that Qualcomm was not behaving
fairly in its licensing of patents related to 3G technology. They
said that Qualcomm broke promises it made to international
standards bodies that it would license its IP fairly if it were
adopted as an industry standard. It said that the charges levied by
Qualcomm were excessive and disproportionate.
