14 DAY TRIAL // The company responsible for the Mac operating system has issued one of its rare press releases (a strategy which seems to generate copious amounts of respect from the Apple fan base), saying that it has responded to a lawsuit brought against it by Nokia a while ago by filing (what else?) a countersuit.
It goes without mentioning that we’re better off simply reporting this stuff, instead of making an analysis asking ourselves who’s right and who’s wrong (generally, both parties are... both right and wrong). But we can’t, in good faith, limit ourselves to that.
“Responding to a lawsuit brought against the company by Nokia, Apple today filed a countersuit claiming that Nokia is infringing 13 Apple patents,” reads Apple’s newest press release. In usual manner, the iPhone maker cites someone big for more credibility (not that Apple is lying).
“Other companies must compete with us by inventing their own technologies, not just by stealing ours,” said Bruce Sewell, Apple’s General Counsel and senior vice president.
Right. So, Apple is calling Nokia a thief. When a company like Apple tells a company like Nokia “Hey, you stole from us” right after Nokia told Apple “You stole from us,” how bad does that insult our intelligence, we ask you?
Please take the time to understand that we too like Apple for its business model, the products it creates, its famous presentations and events, and, most of all, its CEO, Mr. Steve Jobs (just look at all the Psystar-won’t-win brainstorming we did). It’s just irritating to see such a short press release saying “Not so fast there, Nokia!” which ends with the company’s standard reminder that it has “ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh.” We know that! We want to know what the deal is with you and Nokia more recently!
Why is it BusinessWeek’s job to explain that “Nokia, the world's largest phone maker, sued Apple in October claiming infringement of 10 patents and seeking back royalties on the 33.7 million iPhones sold since the device's introduction in 2007. Espoo, Finland-based Nokia had said that all Apple iPhone models use Nokia's technology for wireless data, speech coding, security and encryption?”
What happened to good ol’ Apple disclosing all the handy details for the entire world to see the situation is a bit more complicated than one would think? For a person learning for the first time that the two companies are in a fight, it sure sounds like Nokia is the bad guy. But why was Nokia the first to sue, then?
Leaving our frustration aside, Nokia spokesman Mark Durrant reportedly said the counterclaim doesn't change the "fundamentals" of the original patent infringement suit... so, that’s comforting (this is still BusinessWeek info, by the way). According to the report in question, Durrant stated in a telephone interview, "We will need time to study it before we make any direct comment. But it changes nothing in the fundamentals of the original filing made by Nokia in Delaware."
Just to be perfectly clear, we can grasp that the particularities of the countersuit cannot be disclosed (or at least some of them), but Apple, try to be more transparent! This press release is pure ignorance!