Thursday, 5 April 2007

Nokia Accuses Qualcomm of 'Serial Litigation'

Nokia has told Qualcomm that it does not hold exclusive rights to technology it licensed to Texas Instruments (TI) in 2000, for chips TI sells in Europe. The anti-trust case was filed in May 2005 by Golden Bridge Technology Incorporated (GBT) against Qualcomm, Ericsson...

Nokia has told Qualcomm that it does not hold exclusive rights to technology it licensed to Texas Instruments (TI) in 2000, for chips TI sells in Europe.

The anti-trust case was filed in May 2005 by Golden Bridge Technology Incorporated (GBT) against Qualcomm, Ericsson, Lucent (now Alcatel-Lucent), Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo and Panasonic. The complaint alleged that Qualcomm had conspired to exclude GBT's technology from a wireless industry standard adopted by a number of standard-setting organisations under the auspices of the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). The court determined that there is no evidence that Qualcomm or the other defendants did anything improper. It is unknown whether GBT plans to appeal.

This is the second antitrust lawsuit in two different federal courts against Qualcomm. In September of 2006, the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey dismissed an antitrust complaint filed by Broadcom, ruling that Qualcomm 's supposed conduct as alleged in Broadcom's complaint did not harm competition and did not amount to an antitrust violation.

Nokia and San Diego-based Qualcomm, which invented the CDMA technology, have been fighting on a number of fronts. The United States International Trade Commission ordered an indefinite stay on a lawsuit that Qualcomm had brought against Nokia in late February.

On the other hand, Qualcomm has slapped Nokia with more patent infringement lawsuits. This comes just a week before the April 9 expiration of a cross-licensing agreement between the two companies.

The complaints were filed in the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division and in the Western District of Wisconsin, which allege that Nokia infringed upon five Qualcomm patents.