Nokia files patent lawsuits against HTC, RIM and Viewsonic

Nokia has announced that it has filed patent claims in the US as well as Germany, via which the company alleges that products from HTC, BlackBerry holding company RIM (Research In Motion) and Viewsonic infringe upon a number of its patents. The Finnish firm didn’t specify which of these companies’ products are infringing upon its patents.

The filings include a complaint to the US International Trade Commission (ITC) against Taiwanese smartphone and tablet maker HTC, as well as patent lawsuits against HTC and Viewsonic in the Federal District Court of Delaware, in the US.

In addition, Nokia also filed patent lawsuits against HTC and RIM in the Regional Court in Dusseldorf, Germany and against all three companies in the Regional Courts in Mannheim and Munich, Germany. In total, 45 Nokia patents are included within all these legal claims.

Nokia asserted that its “proprietary innovations” are being used to enable hardware capabilities, the likes of dual function antennas, power management and multimode radios. On the software  side, its patent protected innovations are allegedly being employed to improve features such as  application stores, multitasking, navigation within the mobile OS, conversational message display, dynamic menus, data encryption as well as retrieval of email attachments via the mobile device.

“Nokia is a leader in many technologies needed for great mobile products,” said Louise Pentland, chief legal officer at Nokia. “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 unauthorised use of our proprietary innovations and technologies, which have not been widely licensed.”

Pentland added that many of these inventions are fundamental to Nokia’s own products. “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 unauthorised use of our inventions.”

In other patent related news, Microsoft and Barnes and Noble recently buried their respective legal hatchets, forming a new strategic partnership in the process. This partnership will lead to Windows 8 users in the US and internationally, being provided with access to one of the world’s largest digital catalogues of e-Books, magazines and newspapers.