There's life in the old dog yet
After almost two years of legal wrangling Apple and Nokia have settled their various patent disputes in Nokia's favour. Apple has agreed to pay Nokia a one-off payment and enter into a license agreement that will see it pay royalties to Nokia for the term of the agreement. None of the specific terms have been revealed.
"We are very pleased to have Apple join the growing number of Nokia licensees," said Stephen Elop, president and CEO of Nokia. "This settlement demonstrates Nokia's industry leading patent portfolio and enables us to focus on further licensing opportunities in the mobile communications market."
This last part of Elop's statement is ominous, probably deliberately so, for Android and its OEMs. It's hard to believe at least some of the Nokia patents Apple is paying for aren't also used by Android handsets, thus presenting ‘licensing opportunities' to Nokia. Having seen it take on an beat the biggest tech company in the world, with almost limitless potential legal resources, the likes of Samsung and HTC may decide to bow to the inevitable and just cough up, especially since Apple can now focus its legal hordes on them too.
We have to assume this settlement only covers some of the patents Nokia claimed were infringed, but this looks like a decent financial win for Nokia at an opportune time. The one-off payment will be for retrospective compensation, presumably stretching back to 2007, and while the royalty paid for each iOS device sold may be small, Apple does sell a shed-load of them.
We may get an indication of the amounts of money involved within a couple of months, however, as Nokia said it expects this deal to have a positive impact on its Q2 results, which it recently revised the forecast for, to predict a break-even quarter. So, to some extent, any profit Nokia makes in the next quarter can be attributable to Apple.
For more details on the patents covered in this settlement we recommend FOSS Patents, which has forgotten more about tech patents than the rest of us will ever know. They also published a presentation detailing the dispute on Scribd, allowing us to embed it below. Enjoy.
NokiaVsApple_11.03.31.100
