Thursday, December 22, 2022

Nokia patent case against OPPO stayed as Dusseldorf court is unsure of patent-in-suit's validity--same patent is also being asserted in London

A spokeswoman for the Dusseldorf Regional Court has confirmed to me that a Nokia v. OPPO case over EP3716560 on "processing transmission signals in radio transmitter" was stayed on Tuesday as the court saw a rather high likelihood of the patent being deemed invalid in a parallel proceeding.

This is patent has not been declared essential to any standard as far as I can see.

In October 2021 I also listed a case over the same patent in the High Court of Justice (London).

You can furthermore find EP'560 in the Nokia v. OPPO/OPPO v. Nokia battlemap I published earlier this month. That post also summarized the key litigation events. Nokia has prevailed on several patents, but OPPO has fended off a number of cases in different jurisdictions. Several Nokia v. OPPO cases have been stayed in Dusseldorf, and one in Mannheim, but in some cases there have also been findings of non-infringement.

It is worth noting that Ericsson and Apple have recently settled a dispute that began after the Nokia-OPPO patent spat. The first FRAND-related filings in that dispute came a few months after Nokia's first wave of lawsuits against OPPO, and the first Ericsson v. Apple infringement complaints about 6.5 months after Nokia sued OPPO, showing what a long-running dispute the latter already is. And who knows much longer it will take. It's definitely taken a lot longer now than I thought in the beginning that it would--and by now I can hardly imagine that OPPO's IP team will give up. It looks like they'll keep defending themselves vigorously until the terms are palatable and a settlement makes sense. Maybe some other implementers will still seize the opportunity to make Nokia a "Christmas present".