Apple countersues Nokia for infringing 13 patents
So much for making nice. Apple just announced that it's countersuing Nokia for infringing thirteen of its patents -- slightly upping Nokia's claim that Apple's infringing ten. We haven't seen the case yet, but we'll post it up for you as soon as we find it -- and as we predicted in our breakdown of Nokia's complaint, this is shaping up to be a long and costly nightmare of a suit. Hey, do you think Apple general counsel Bruce Sewell might have a crazy lightning rod of a statement about the case for us?
"Other companies must compete with us by inventing their own technologies, not just by stealing ours," said Bruce Sewell, Apple's General Counsel and senior vice president.
Cool, thanks. We'll be in the corner under a Nomex blanket for the next few months.
Update: Here's the PDF of the reply -- we're still reading all 79 pages of it, but it's what we expected: Apple says Nokia's patents aren't actually essential to GSM / UMTS, denies infringing them, and says they're invalid and / or unenforceable anyway. Apple also says Nokia wanted unreasonable license terms for the patents, including a cross-license for Apple's various iPhone device patents as part of any deal, which Apple clearly wasn't willing to do. That's in stark contrast to what Nokia says it wants in its lawsuit -- all it's asked the court for is past due license fees on its patents. (Which is odd, if you think about it: Nokia wouldn't come to terms on a license that didn't include iPhone patents, but it'll spend the cash on litigation for past due fees? That seems silly.) Oh, and if you're just in this for the bitchy quotes, here you go:
As Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia's executive Vice President and General Manager of Multimedia, stated at Nokia's GoPlay event in 2007 when asked about the similarities of Nokia's new offerings to the already released iPhone:"[i]f there is something good in the world, we copy with pride." True to this quote, Nokia has demonstrated its willingness to copy Apple's iPhone ideas as well as Apple's basic computing technologies, all while demanding Apple pay for access to Nokia's purported standards essential patent.
We'll let you know if we see anything else of interest, but we'd say we're in for a long, bumpy ride here.
