The automotive patent wars are heating up. On Wednesday, a key Nokia v. Daimler decision is going to be handed down in Munich. Meanwhile, Nokia's partners in crime are pretty active, too. Three weeks ago I reported on patent infringement complaints brought by a Nokia-fed troll, Conversant, against Tesla in the Western District of Texas and in Mannheim, Germany. In that post I also mentioned other pending litigation by contributors to the infamous Avanci patent pool against Tesla:
a lawsuit by Foxconn-owned Sharp in Japan, and
a case brought by patent troll Sisvel in the District of Delaware over former Nokia patents.
The latest news is that Sisvel stepped up its campaign on Friday (May 15, 2020) by filing a second Delaware complaint against Tesla (this post continues below the document):
20-05-15 DED20cv655 Sisvel ... by Florian Mueller on Scribd
The co-complainants are Sisvel and one of its subsidiaries, named 3G Licensing.
The prayers for relief do not include injunctive relief for the time being. It's just about money.
These are the nine patents-in-suit, all of which were declared essential to certain cellular standards (3G and 4G):
U.S. Patent No. 7,979,070 on "mobile equipment for sending an attach request to a network" (a former Nokia patent that was declared essential to the 4G/LTE standard)
U.S. Patent No. 8,600,383 on an "apparatus and method for making measurements in mobile telecommunications system user equipment" (a former BlackBerry patent declared essential to the 4G/LTE standard)
U.S. Patent No. 8,189,611 on a "system and method for resolving contention among applications requiring data connections between a mobile communications device and a wireless network" (another former BlackBerry patent declared essential to the 4G/LTE standard)
U.S. Patent No. 7,215,653 on "controlling data transmission rate on the reverse link for each mobile station in a dedicated manner" (a former LG patent declared essential to the 3G standard)
U.S. Patent No. 7,319,718 on a "CQI coding method for HS-DPCCH" (another former LG patent declared essential to the 3G standard)
U.S. Patent No. 7,661,625 on a "method of scheduling an uplink packet transmission channel in a mobile communication system" (a third former LG patent declared essential to 3G)
U.S. Patent No. 7,580,388 on a "method and apparatus for providing enhanced messages on common control channel in wireless communication system" (a fourth former LG patent declared essential to 3G)
U.S. Patent No. 7,869,396 on a "data transmission method and data re-transmission method" (a former LG patent declared essential to 4G/LTE and temporarily assigned to Thomson)
U.S. Patent No. 8,971,279 on a "method and apparatus for indicating deactivation of semi-persistent scheduling" (a patent filed by Thomson Licensing claiming priority to a patent originally filed by LG; declared essential to 4G/LTE)
So this is a typical "privateering" case, with operating companies--especially a couple whose core business (handsets) failed miserably--having transferred patents to a patent troll for the purpose of extracting royalties from makers of innovative products.
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