Apple Countersues Nokia for Copying iPhone (Plus Disputed Patents and Full Text of Counterclaim)

Comments

1. Merry Christmas, Everyone. Let's file a law suit.

   This is neither free nor effective advertising. It's just plain sad.

   I'd much rather be reading articles about cool products and services. (No fault of the author.)

   DD

   Posted by demodave at December 11th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
   

2. this is just ridiculous. you shouldn't be able to patent teleconferencing or list scrolling. some of those patents are just too bland. there were touch screens before apple made this, and they had scrolling features that match the description of this patent. lame.

   Posted by greg_richarson at December 11th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
   

3. Did you miss that this was a countersuit?

   Posted by Steven Fisher at December 11th, 2009 at 5:52 pm
   

4. Did you also miss that the patents are for specific implementations of the processes described, not the processes themselves?

   Posted by standerby at December 11th, 2009 at 8:44 pm
   

5. So what's Apple's end game? To make Nokia pay reparations and drop their models, or to just get them to drop the lawsuit?

   Posted by fishchick at December 11th, 2009 at 9:52 pm
   

6. Wall Street rewarded Nokia and dissed Apple on today's news of the suit, same thing happened back on Oct 22nd when Nokia sued Apple, Wall Street gave Nokia the nod over Apple. Apparently Wall Street thinks Apple should bow to Nokia for sitting on their laurels.

   Posted by appleinvestor at December 11th, 2009 at 11:46 pm
   

7. Thankfully the consumer knows best. Nokia is in big trouble going forward, Apple has a two year lead. No phone alone is going to dismantle the iPhone. It's the ecosphere around the iPhone that's gonna keep it king of the hill for the foreseeable future.

   Posted by appleinvestor at December 11th, 2009 at 11:49 pm
   

8. The validity of the patents here is not the issue at all. It's a licensing issue only.

   And your Apple-bashing is a misfire for a number of reasons: 1) the patent troll here is Nokia, not Apple, 2) Apple's patents do not cover general concepts like “scrolling” or “touch” or even “multitouch” or any other obvious thing, they cover specific features of the iPhone as implemented and there are many novel features, 3) Apple has not sued anyone over their iPhone patents — not Palm for the Pre, not Blackberry for the Storm, not any phone company even though they all have iPhone clones by now — they have only COUNTERSUED Nokia after Nokia tried to kick Apple out of GSM by refusing to license Nokia's GSM-related patents to Apple, and Apple alone. When the GSM standard was created, in exchange for getting a cut of every GSM phone sold, Nokia agreed that the cut would be the same price for everyone and nobody can be excluded. Otherwise, Nokia would get to say who can be in the phone business and who cannot, and nobody would have participated in GSM and Nokia would have got nothing.

   Now, after collecting a royalty on every iPhone sold, Nokia went to Apple and said you're going to pay more per GSM phone than anyone else, and not only that, you're also going to give us a license to all of your iPhone patents so that we can copy every model in exact detail. When Apple said no, we're going to pay the same as everyone else, just like you agreed from the start of GSM, Nokia sued Apple.

   The worst part of this for Nokia is that they already admitted they were caught flat-footed by the iPhone, that they found themselves in an uncompetitive position. When you're in that position, you have 2 choices: work really hard to put yourself back in a competitive position (become a better figure skater), or do something anti-competitive (hit a better figure skater in the knees with a pipe). Nokia did the latter. Nokia admitted that working hard was not going to cut it, even if they work really hard they can't beat Apple. They though they were dominating Apple by being king of GSM but they actually submitted to Apple by admitting they cannot compete fairly with Apple.

   If you say “well Nokia should be able to refuse to license their GSM patents to anyone they feel like” then you should understand that Apple is in the Nokia position with the MPEG-4 standard. So if Nokia can legitimately say “no GSM for Apple and Apple alone” then Apple can say “no MPEG-4 for Nokia and Nokia alone.” About 99% of the world's phones are GSM and about 99% of the world's consumer digital audio and video is in MPEG-4, including all of iTunes and YouTube and Blu-Ray. So that tit-for-tat would result in no phones from Apple and no media players from Nokia, and likely the end of both the GSM and MPEG-4 standards. So Nokia is playing a dangerous game.

   > So what's Apple's endgame?

   Apple wants to pay the same fee for GSM as RIM, Palm, and other phone makers.

   Posted by Hamranhansenhansen at December 11th, 2009 at 11:56 pm
   

9. Well they've probably both copied each-other's ideas. Nokia should instead concern itself with Apple's blatant abuse of their market share. For example you have to use iTunes to activate your iPhone – does anyone think Microsoft would get away with that?

   Posted by Songstall at December 12th, 2009 at 9:01 am
   

10. 2 things:
    1) You don't appear to know what “blatant abuse of their market share” means.
    2) You don't “have to use iTunes to activate your iPhone” at all. You can quite happily get your iPhone activated in-store if you want. iTunes is, in fact, provided as a more efficient, convenient way to activate your phone at home *if you want*.
    Please explain how the non-mandatory use of a piece of Apple software to activate a piece of Apple hardware constitutes “blatant abuse of their market share” when there is no competing piece of software that could do the same job, much less why anyone would want to bother creating one.
    Doofus.

    Posted by maddog_uk_69 at December 12th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
    

11. Well I won't be drawn into unnecessary insults, and you make a fair point about the in-store activation – I got mine delivered so wasn't aware of that option. However, unless Apple have already been made to climb down on this issue, as far as I am aware you have to use iTunes in order to put media on your iPhone, which may be fine for most people but it is very akin to the integral bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows by Microsoft – for which they were fined heavily by the EU for monopoly abuse. Indeed, iTunes (on Windows anyway) is a dreadful piece of software and highly volatile, causing frequent crashes on my PC, so there very well should be alternative software for it. Or rather, they should behave like most other phone companies and use standard plug-and-play media so it is not necessary to install special software at all. The thrust of my point is, it is not a likely coincidence that Apple has a dominant market position in both the music download market as well as the high-end phone market, given the way their software works, and sooner or later that is likely to catch up with them, just as it did for Microsoft.

    Posted by Songstall at December 13th, 2009 at 12:07 am
    

12. The mistake you make, like so many others, is in your belief that iTunes and the iPhone/iPod are somehow 2 separate products that Apple then illegally walls off from other product manufacturers. They're not. They are part of a single system; iTunes is the software component you use to load media onto your iPhone/iPod. Your iPhone/iPod is the hardware component you use to carry around the contents of your iTunes library.
    Where do you get the idea that the software component in this system is obliged to support any devices except the ones Apple designed it for? Have Apple prevented anyone from writing media management software that runs on Mac OS X? Have Apple prevented any Phone/MP3 player manufacturers from creating drivers/software to support devices other than the ones Apple makes? No, they have not.*IF* they had, then *THAT* would have been abuse of their market share.
    Your example of Microsoft and Internet Explorer is irrelevant. MS was trying to appropriate existing open standards with proprietary extensions to the way IE handled HTML, extensions that would have never gained any traction were it not for MS's market share. They also engaged in blatant anticompetitive behaviour against others in the marketplace. Am I really having to explain this to you?
    Apple has gained market share with iTunes/iPhone/iPod because users have *CHOSEN* their products. It may be convenient to label Apple users as mindless sheeple who blindly consume whatever Steve Jobs tells them to, but the fact is there is plenty of choice out there. You just don't seem to like the choices people are making.
    As for the relative stability of iTunes on Windows, I can't comment. All I would say is that in the past, out of Microsoft and Apple, one company was found in a court of law to have deliberately engineered errors in the other company's media playback plugin, and to have misled users into thinking that crashes had been caused by one particular company's media player software rather than by another particular company's operating system.

    Posted by maddog_uk_69 at December 13th, 2009 at 12:45 am
    

13. Now, as an European telephone specialist (Europe ist the the place where most of the international standards like GSM UMTS ISDN DECT …. come from) i see a sue for three models of the Nokia phone family – which is very huge and confusing against an one product company.

    Regardless of the level of “invention” – which is normally very poor and the us version in average don't reach the level of an german “Gebrauchsmuster” and will not granted in the EU – i think the contradiction sue from apple shows the validity of the Nokia patents.

    Posted by trebon at December 13th, 2009 at 4:39 am
    

14. The whole point of Nokia's suit is that Apple is _not_ paying royalties for every iPhone sold – there is no license agreement. Where does it say that Nokia asked Apple to pay more than anybody else ? Apple only says that Nokia wants more than Apple is willing to pay. And even if they did, the FRAND terms do not prohibit this. The licensing fees do not have to be identical for every licensee, they only have to be “reasonable”.

    The fact is that Apple wants to force Nokia to sell them their license at lower price than offered and Apple themselves are not willing to license their patents to Nokia at all. The latter is clearly stated in the counterclaim. Apple wants to protect their monopoly.

    Posted by kellerodis at December 13th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
    

15. I work in the wireless industry for 20 years, including mobile phone designs and patent breaking activities.

    Most of the so-called “essential IPs” of those wireless standards can be broken when you have the time to go in the dusty places at ETSI and other standards' places. Some other patents can be broken from prior-art found in IEEE papers and RFCs.

    Patents is a way to protect existing situations from new comers. I do not have the time for this but could contribute in breaking some of them placed on a discussion web site.

    Posted by AULF at December 26th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
    

16. NoKia must have hired Ben Dover Esq. as the head of their legal team, because they're about to get a Big Spankin!

    Posted by savagenation at January 17th, 2010 at 10:01 pm
    

17. You must work for Apple, I can't find a single accurate statement or assertion in anything you wrote here. I especially like the part where you say Apple hasn't sued anyone over their phone patents. If you're going to spread lies you should try to include at least a small seed of truth, otherwise people will invariably recognize your fanboy gibberish for what it is.

    Posted by Justin at July 12th, 2010 at 4:42 pm