Canadian smartphone and software company BlackBerry is suing Finnish telecom giant Nokia for allegedly infringing on 11 of its patents.
According to a lawsuit filed in Delaware this week, first spotted by Bloomberg, BlackBerry accused Nokia of “egregious infringement”of its patented 3G and 4G technology. The company, BlackBerry alleged, was “willfully blind” in encouraging operators like T-Mobile and AT&T to purchase and deploy infringing products to enhance their LTE and UMTS networks.
“BlackBerry seeks to obtain recompense for Nokia’s unauthorized use of BlackBerry’s patented technology,” BlackBerry wrote in its complaint.
At issue are 11 patents – numbers 6,996,418; 8,254,246; 8,494,090; 7,529,305; 8,861,433; 9,426,697; 9,253,772; 8,897,192; 9,125,202; 8,243,683; and 8,644,829 – covering some standards-essential technologies. The patents span OFDM, a channel estimation method for MIMO-OFDM systems, a method of detecting the number of transmitting antennas in a base station, the combined use of space-time coding and spatial multiplexing as well as the use of orthogonal transformation in space-time coding, a system for multi-carrier network operation, and a multi-beam cellular communication system, among other things.
Several of the patents were purchased from Nortel by the Rockstar Consortium – of which companies like BlackBerry, Apple and Microsoft were a part – when the former folded in bankruptcy back in 2011.
BlackBerry alleged in its complaint that Nokia is far from ignorant of its patents since it cited some of them in its own applications and had previously tried to take over the patents as part of a failed deal to acquire Nortel’s business in 2009.
Neither Nokia nor BlackBerry has released a public statement about the case.
The case number is 17-155 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware.
Filed Under: Infrastructure
