BlackBerry has filed a patent lawsuit against Nokia in in federal court in Wilmington, Delaware. The patents in question are 11 Industry Standard Patents or SEPs which are essential part of 3GPP standard in Networking industry.
As per a report in Bloomberg,
Nokia’s products including its Flexi Multiradio base stations, radio network controllers and Liquid Radio software are using technology covered by as many as 11 patents, BlackBerry said in a complaint filed Tuesday in federal court in Wilmington, Delaware.
BlackBerry has just stopped making smartphones by itself. In a very similar move adopted by Nokia it has now outsourced its smartphone manufacturing to TCL. So, now it seeks to monetize its patent portfolio for some cash.
As per the report, BlackBerry has acquired some of these 11 patents as a part of a group called Rockstar Consortium. Rockstar bought Nortel’s patents for $4.5 billion in 2011. SEP patents have a standard licensing fee structure and Blackberry doesn’t want to stop Nokia from using them but seeks royalty.
Anyways, we may see Nokia counter-suing BlackBerry invoking its own lineup of patents soon.
