Amid the ongoing patent war among technology companies, Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia Corp. (NOK) has Wednesday sued HTC, RIM and Viewsonic in the U.S. and Germany alleging that the three companies' products infringe Nokia patents. The lawsuits are filed for infringing a total of 45 Nokia patents.
A lawsuit has been filed against Taiwanese smart phone maker HTC Corp. and visual technology company Viewsonic Corp. in the US Federal District Court of Delaware, as well as against HTC and BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. (RIMM) in the Regional Court in Dusseldorf, Germany. Further, a lawsuit has been filed against all the three companies in the Regional Courts in Mannheim and Munich, Germany.
Espoo, Finland-based Nokia has also filed a complaint against HTC with the US International Trade Commission or ITC.
"We have already licensed our standards essential patents to more than 40 companies. Though we'd prefer to avoid litigation, Nokia had to file these actions to end the unauthorized use of our proprietary innovations and technologies, which have not been widely licensed," Nokia's Chief Legal Officer Louise Pentland said in a statement.
The Nokia patents are being used by the three companies to boost the hardware capabilities of the products they manufacture. These include patents for dual function antennas, power management and multimode radios, as well as software enhancement features related to menus, email, messaging, navigation, and application stores.
Meanwhile, Nokia has not revealed which specific products from HTC, RIM, and Viewsonic are violating its patents.
"We'd rather that other companies respect our intellectual property and compete using their own innovations, but as these actions show, we will not tolerate the unauthorized use of our inventions," Pentland added.
Nokia has a strong and broad portfolio of about 30,000 patents and 10,000 patent families related to the wireless industry, and has invested more than 45 billion euros in research and development to built the portfolio.
In Wednesday's regular trading session, NOK is currently trading at $3.59, down $0.09 or 2.45% on a volume of 16.13 million shares.
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