Nokia launches multimedia patent enforcement against Acer and ASUS PCs, HiSense smart TVs

Context: Yesterday, Nokia settled its multimedia patent dispute with Amazon. It’s already Nokia’s fourth license deal covering streaming services, and one of numerous deals covering devices. Five months ago, Nokia settled another multimedia patent dispute with HP. In 2021, Nokia also settled multimedia patent litigation with Lenovo. Most of those deals, which applies to the industry at large and to Nokia in particular, are struck without litigation, such as a recent renewal with Samsung.

What’s new: Today Nokia announced the filing of patent infringement lawsuits in Germany and the Unified Patent Court (UPC) against PC makers Acer and ASUS (long form: ASUSTeK) as well as smart TV maker Hisense. In a corporate blog post, Philippe Lanet, head of Nokia’s consumer electronics licensing program, explains that Nokia merely seeks “to ensure fair compensation.”

Direct impact: Given that the objective is to bring those companies to the negotiating table, it is unlikely that all three disputes will last long. At the same time, among three companies there can always be one or more “holdouts” as well.

Wider ramifications: The settlement of the Amazon dispute was announced on the last day in office of prior CEO Pekka Lundmark, and today’s announcement coincides with the official start of new CEO Justin Hotard.

Nokia says in the above-mentioned corporate blog post that Acer, ASUS and Hisense infringe “a mix of Nokia’s video coding patents.” ip fray will try to find out more about those cases once the courts are able to provide further information to the general public or other sources volunteer case and patent numbers.

The recently-appointed president of Nokia Technologies, Patrik Hammarén, previously explained in an interview that it is his company’s and his personal philosophy to ensure that everyone in a given market must take a license. In the other event, freeriders would gain a competitive advantage over those who respect intellectual property.

There has been only one prior situation in which Nokia announced patent litigation against three companies in one fell swoop: in the spring of 2012, Nokia sued HTC, BlackBerry and ViewSonic. BlackBerry was first to settle. ViewSonic didn’t invest much in its defenses (for example, it didn’t even bring nullity complaints in the Federal Patent Court) as Germany was not a major market for the company. It took almost two years until HTC settled. It was a rare situation in which a company already had a license to Nokia’s standard-essential patents (SEPs), but not to the rest of the portfolio.

Nokia refers to “over 250 patent licensing agreements” in today’s corporate blog posts on the Acer, ASUS and Hisense filings. Compared to that number, the company does not sue often.

While Hisense is a purely defensive player, Acer and ASUS have actually enforced patents of their own. For example, Acer sued automaker Volkswagen in 2021 over 4G patents.

It’s the normal course of business that new cases are brought once a company has freed up litigation resources. And it’s not unheard of for new filings to happen very shortly after a settlement, given that major patent holders typically have complaints against unwilling licensees prepared and can file very quickly when they make the decision to do so.