Nokia, Apple lawyers make peace over nasty IP wrangle Nokia and Apple have made peace after a brief but vituperative legal stand-off. The two settled all their outstanding issues over intellectual property rights, with an unspecified lump sum heading from California to Finland, as well as royalties. Nokia filed a bunch of lawsuits against Apple in the USA and Germany in December …
The definition most use for "patent troll" is a company that does not make any products using the patents, only sues others who do. That's not Apple. They only sue over patents they use in their own products - they don't even bother suing when someone infringes patents they hold but don't use in their own products.
They do sue about silly stuff though, even if most people don't understand the "rounded corners" in question were not on the phones, but on the icons.
I wasn't suggesting Nokia was a patent troll either. If they had ceased operations entirely and existing only as a patent holding/licensing company for patents they used to use, then they'd be a patent troll. But Nokia is trying to get back into the phone business, so while they may be a shell of their former selves, they're not a troll.
"Unable to compete with innovative companies such as Apple – which had developed a revolutionary hardware and software platform – Nokia quickly transformed itself," Cupertino said at the time. "It changed from a company focused on supplying cell phones and other consumer products to a company bent on exploiting the patents that remain from its years as a successful cell phone supplier."
Sounds like a pot and kettle situation to me.
Motorola, Ericsson, Nokia, Philips etc developed stuff in an era when patents meant more, though the USA has been into approving dubious patents since Victorian times, more than any other country.
Can anyone show me even a dozen Apple phone patents that are genuinely innovative, not a copy of prior art and not obvious to any competent Engineer schooled in the art?
Apple vs Samsung was ludicrous. Not ONE of the Apple patents (or "Design Patents" = UK "Registered Design") should ever have been approved by USPTO.
I'm not surprised Apple has settled and the money is going to Finland, nor that MS got anything for their money except staff and factories that Nokia was going to close anyway. They have done paper, welly boots, TVs, setboxes and people were surprised when they decided to do phones.
Apple entered already proven markets with their iPod (the only "innovation" was iTunes and its ability to dismember LPs a track at a time with publisher agreement) and later iPhone (9 years after smart phones appeared) just as mobile data was getting practical, the innovation being the operator exclusive deals per country with bundled data when only corporate staff could afford data. The GUI was bought in and the HW was commodity parts, the clever HW being Samsung's 6400 family ARM that had CPU(with all I/O), RAM and Flash stacked in one package making PCB design simple for a beginner, no external memory PCB tracks needed.
"Motorola, Ericsson, Nokia, Philips etc developed stuff in an era when patents meant more, though the USA has been into approving dubious patents since Victorian times, more than any other country."
I did think it was a bit rich that Apple was calling Nokia a patent-troll, knowing the non-practicing-entity connotations which go along with that description. Nokia and Ericsson innovated the shit out of mobile phone network infrastructure back when the Apple Mac SE was cutting edge, and deserve to profit from their patents.
This post has been deleted by its author
Two GRATE AMXRERICAN COMPANIES work together TO MAKE AMERCA GRATE AGAIN. Apple MAKES THE BEST PHONES RIHT HERE ON AMERICAL SOIL with real Americans doin the soilderinge and NOCKIA makes rubber ducks for TRANNIES or some SHT1TT. I meant
Grannies not trannies. Damn intanet TWISTING MY words Again. THIS IS WHATBTRUMO IS SOING FOR AMERICa! TRUMP. Brings good folk together.
All the common aspects of darkness and the light, when you put two former enemies to the same room, they need a reason why peace in the galaxy is supposedly a good thing, after all this fighting. Some minor movement of these green pieces of paper cannot ever make this kind of peace happen, so there must be some greater plot behind all this. Intellectual property and lawyers can get all the credit for creating this new peace chapter in our story. The companies are clearly paying significant sums to the lawyers, if they can make this significant decisions happen without extended legal paperwork being spread all around the internet, consuming tons of popcorn from the punters, eating valuable work time. Sadly the whole internet will be bored with this decision, all this fighting and plot twists are over and we must find our entertainment from somewhere else.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
