Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Week 13 Blog 1 - Another Update on Nokia vs HTC!

An article from Foss Patents immediately caught by eye, as it was an update on the battle going on between Nokia and HTC! What surprised me is how hard HTC is fighting. While RIM (Blackberry) and ViewSonic were quick to admit their infringement on some of Nokia's patents, HTC has been defending itself for almost a year (!), according to the author of this article.
However, this is working pretty well for HTC. Recently, some judges in Germany have announced the dismissal of Nokia's assertion on two of its patents against HTC. The first patent is the EP1581016, which is about a communication network terminal for accessing the Internet, and the second patent is the EP0792077, which is about a multi-service mobile station. Nokia has claimed that one of the most popular application on Android devices, Google Play was infringing on the first patent because it allows third-party application developers to provide date to the end-user devices. Since this assertion was dismissed, I guess this was pretty good news not only for HTC but also for Google. I think this was pretty significant for Google, since it looks like they have not been getting very good news lately.
Going back to how hard HTC is fighting, they have also countersued Nokia multiple times. Although HTC ended up losing against Nokia over a battery conserving method patent, HTC has come out strong, stating that this particular settlement would not affect them in any way, since they have come up with an alternative solution.
When I first started reading about the battles going on between these two companies, I thought HTC did not have a chance in successfully defending itself. Therefore, reading about this recent news, I am quite surprised how things have turned out so far. I will for sure be following these collection of lawsuits.


http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/04/german-court-dismisses-another-nokia.html


4 comments:

  1. If Nokia is going for HTC for Google Play, why arn't they going for the App store?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Good to hear Google gains from this. I've mostly seen news about Google doing badly lately. Although this doesn't relate to their acquisition of Motorola, which has been the main focus of criticism just because of how expensive it was (12.5 billion dollars) and it's lack of victories so far.

    ReplyDelete
  3. It's interesting reading the majority of the comments and finding out how likeable of a company Google is. Similar to Apple, Google has a large fan base and seeing them get hurt on the litigation end is disheartening for many people, thus, this is a little bit of good news.

    ReplyDelete
  4. A trend i have noticed is that Google and HTC fight hard to deny the infringement claims made on them. However, this is great news on Google's end, as they stand to gain from it.

    ReplyDelete