14 DAY TRIAL // There's already some more news on the Qualcomm vs. Nokia series, where it's already hard to keep track of who's suing whom over what. Nokia and Qualcomm have been involved in a series of intellectual property and licensing disputes over the last year and are currently in conflict regarding how much Nokia should pay Qualcomm for using its CDMA intellectual property in North America. The agreement according to which Nokia pays patent royalties to Qualcomm expires on Monday. Now Qualcomm has filed separate federal lawsuits in Texas and Wisconsin involving GSM/GPRS/EDGE mobile phones.
The Texas case involves three patents regarding download applications as well as other digital content over GPRS/EDGE data networks while the Wisconsin case deals with two patents concerning Qualcomm related to speech encoders used in some phones run on the GSM standard. Similar cases are pending in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and China. Not so long ago, leading mobile phone manufacturer Nokia filed patent complaints against Qualcomm in Germany and the Netherlands. Through the complaints, Nokia requested that Qualcomm's European patents be exhausted on some products there.
According to Qualcomm, the company "remains in discussions with Nokia regarding an extension of their CDMA/WCDMA license agreement. In the event that, after April 9, 2007, the existing agreement is not extended or a new agreement is not signed, under the terms of the current agreement Nokia's right to sell subscriber products under most of our patents and, therefore, Nokia's obligation to pay royalties to us for certain of those products will both cease, and our rights to sell integrated circuits under Nokia's patents will likewise cease." Nokia has a unilateral right to extend the agreement through December 2008, but seems to be determined to reduce the amount of money paid to Qualcomm.