BlackBerry sues Nokia – A lawsuit battle between once leading smartphone brands

According to recent report by Bloomberg, BlackBerry has filed a lawsuit against Nokia for infringing its patents. The Canadian company demands royalties on the Finnish company’s mobile networking products which may have infringed its patents.

A quick look may drop you in thoughts that both the companies were once the giant in mobile phone industry. Where one was the top business phone and services provider, the other one was way ahead of other firms making feature and smartphones for consumers.

For now Nokia once again licensed its brand name for smartphones to HMD Global for next 10 years. On the other hand BlackBerry after struggling to make Android smartphones, licensed its name to TCL. But both the firms are still deep into building network infrastructures for telecom industry. That’s where this new battle starts from.

The Lawsuit

BlackBerry, in a lawsuit against Nokia filed with a federal court in Wilmington, Delaware, alleges the Finnish manufacturer of infringing 11 of its patents in mobile networking products.

Nokia encourages and instructs customers, mobile service providers such as T-Mobile and AT&T, to purchase, deploy and use infringing products to develop and operate their LTE networks and UMTS networks.

Like most, this lawsuit is also not targeting to block usage of its patents. Instead the Canadian firm is seeking royalty fees for the patents in subject.

BlackBerry was part of a group called Rockstar Consortium that bought Nortel’s patents out of bankruptcy for $4.5 billion in 2011. The patents were split up between the members of the group, which included Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp

According to report, BlackBerry acquired some of these patents from Nortel – after it bankrupted. BlackBerry also noted in the filing that Nokia has previously had tried to buy those patents directly from Nortel.