#26: Nokia vs. HTC

Nokia is experiencing a fairly high drop-out rate of its patent infringement claims against rivals. HTC has been consistently defending itself and shows no signs of backing down.

On April 23^rd, the Mannheim Regional Court held a trial on Nokia's patent infringement action against HTC over patent number EP1581016, "a communication network terminal for accessing Internet." The court unusually decided to announce its decision later that day.

Additionally, after another trial held in the afternoon that related to Nokia’s lawsuits against HTC over patent number EP0792077, a "multi-service mobile station" and against ViewSonic over that patent as well as its divisional patent EP1601167, Judge Dr. Holger Kircher dismissed Nokia’s case based on finding of non-infringement.

This is not the first of such dismissals, Nokia had claimed that Android’s app architecture centered around the Google Play store infringes the “o16 patent because of the way it allows third-party app developers to provide data to the end-user devices on which their programs run via a Google-operated server.” However, that went no where. And recently another lawsuit that targeted Google play was dismissed.
Judge Dr. Kricher has shown much skepticism concerning Nokia’s infringement theory. He and his colleagues felt that they could only side with Nokia’s infringement contentions if they seriously bent three rules:

1.      Nokia considered the term "service page" to include not only web pages (as the term suggests) but also apps. If this had been the only issue, an infringement would not have been too likely, but not inconceivable.

2.      Nokia faced an insurmountable challenge in persuading the court that two "means for wireless communication" limitations could mean one and the same mobile Internet connection. Based on the claim language the court felt that these claim limitations are meant to be different connections, with only the second one relating to communication "with a device", conversely suggesting a structural difference between the two consecutive limitations. The court identified further support for this position in the specification, such as its Figure 8 (which illustrates two types of connections), and in the fact that independent claim 11 uses a different article, presumably reflecting the author's awareness of this issue. Nokia's lawyers tried their best to argue that the patent also covers cases in which the same connection serves both purposes at the same time, but their arguments were of a functional nature and lacked a basis in the claims and the description.

3.      The court also touched on a third issue that the parties had not paid much attention to. It would take too long to explain this one here, and it wasn't outcome-determinative in the end.

The results concerning Google Play where a huge relief for Google as the company has been having a very difficult time winning any patent infringement cases lately (ever since it has been using its 12.5 Motorola purchase to file claims against other companies). To further this point, yesterday, the USITC tossed Motorola’s last complaint against Apple. Google’s attempts to gain a stronghold over Apple and Microsoft have been very unsuccessful.

Conversely, “the dismissal of Nokia’s second Google Play-related suit against HTC shows that Google is still a very effective defendant.” However, Nokia owns enough patents that it is only a matter of time until another break though emerges and a new lawsuit is filed. Therefore it is important to win offensive cases and fend off patent assertions.

HTC filed 3 countersuits against Nokia, Nokia won the first injunction against HTC over a power-saving patent. That one is already being enforced, but HTC’s German sales will apparently not be affected. The other cases have been dismissed. HTC will probably win something soon though.
The EP 167 Nokia asserted against ViewSonic was deemed too narrow. “The court was inclined to find the broader EP’077 infringed, but doubts the validity, making a stay the most likely outcome and an outright dismissal the second-most likely one.”

Nokia does have some gems in its patent portfolio, but it takes dozens of patent assertions to identify them. I've said on numerous occasions that the moment of truth for a patent is not when the patent office grants it: patent offices grant too many patents they shouldn't issue. The moment of truth is litigation. Once you assert a patent against a deep-pocketed, sophisticated rival, you'll see its true strength (or weakness). No patent valuation method is a substitute for this real-world test.