The two companies are both accusing each other of failure to comply with their FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) licensing obligations. In November of last year, Ericsson filed a couple of federal complaints against Samsung, and in December, Samsung came back and filed ITC complaints against Ericsson about several 4G related patents.
Samsung has also responded to the federal patent infringement lawsuits of Ericsson held in Texas; it is going to countersue Ericsson over eight more patents. Those patents consists of those about methods for devices to transmit and receive information, and also about methods to compute cycle redundancy check for multiple code blocks.
Going back to the beginning, Samsung claims that Ericsson is acting like a patent troll after the company exited the smartphone industry. Ericsson seems like they are asking for unreasonable licensing fees from Samsung by threatening them to eliminate their products. Although at first, this case appears to be one of the many smartphone companies' lawsuits that we have seen so far, I feel like this is especially an interesting one to focus on, as the companies are acting quite aggressively towards one another.
http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/03/samsung-says-ericsson-behaves-like.html
Ericsson is an interesting company because they came out of relative obscurity and burst onto the tech scene. What if this all was one elaborate troll?
ReplyDeleteI also wrote on this. In Redwood Shores there is a gym I go to which is adjacent to the Sony-Ericsson building, and I remember when Ericsson sold their stake to Sony I saw the construction workers change the sign in front of the building to only Sony. Now that Ericsson is out of the market, they continue to utilize their patents and are now no different from a patent troll. I am glad with the moves that Samsung are making, Ericsson is nothing more than a pest to them right now.
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