The previous post was about Nokia trolling Lenovo, and now Nokia itself is getting trolled again by a German company it knows all too well: IPCom, which sued Nokia from 2008 until Nokia's sale of its ruined handset division to Microsoft. At the height of the IPCom v. Nokia dispute, the latter took far more reasonable positions on the FRAND defense to SEP assertions than nowadays.
IPCom signed its presumably most lucrative license deal with Deutsche Telekom because its outgoing CEO faced a risk of personal liability.
Today, IPCom brought parallel patent infringement complaints in the Eastern District of Texas (Chief Judge Gilstrap's Marshall Division) against U.S. wireless carriers AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon, alleging the infringement of six (AT&T) or five (Sprint, Verizon) former Bosch and Hitachi standard-essential patents (SEPs) by infrastructure products from Nokia, Ericsson, and Mavenir. The former Bosch patents have expired, but IPCom can still seek damages for past infringement.
I've uploaded all three complaints to Scribd (AT&T, Sprint, Verizon). For your convenience, let me show you the AT& complaint right here (this post continues below the document):
20-10-01 IPCom v. AT&T ... by Florian Mueller
These are the patents-in-suit:
Former Bosch patents:
U.S. Patent No. 7,333,822 on a "method for transmitting messages in a telecommunication network" (SMS/MMS)
U.S. Patent No. 10,382,909 on a "method for transmitting messages in a telecommunication network" (MMS messages using WAP Push messages)
U.S. Patent No. 6,983,147 on a "method of transmitting signaling information, a master station, a mobile station and message elements" (LTE)
Former Hitachi patents:
U.S. Patent No. 6,813,261 on a "method of mobile communication and apparatus therefor" (LTE)
U.S. Patent No. 7,006,463 on a CDMA communication system and its transmission power control method"
U.S. Patent No. 7,778,310 on a "code division multiple access mobile communication system" (asserted only over 3G/UMTS functionality used by AT&T)
Nokia, Ericsson, and Mavenir will presumably intervene on defendants' behalf, as they face indemnifcation claims by the carriers (at least that's the way it usually works).
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