The two phone giants are in the midst of a major legal battle between Apple and Nokia escalated Friday. Apple’s latest counter-strike is a complaint filed with the International Trade Commission (ITC) seeking to block US imports of Nokia mobile devices.
The smartphone patent debacle started in October, Nokia filed a lawsuit against Apple in U.S. District Court in Delaware regarding 10 patents related to wireless handsets, which Nokia says Apple has refused to license. Every iPhone model since the original, introduced in 2007, infringes on those patents, Nokia has charged.
Apple then filed a countersuit accusing Nokia of copying technology inside the iPhone. Apple said Nokia is violating a range of patents, from real-time signal processing methods to list scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touch-screen display.
Nokia spokesperson Mark Durrant responded to Bloomberg about Apple’s latest request via text message saying, “Nokia will study the complaint when it is received and continue to defend itself vigorously. However this does not alter the fact that Apple has failed to agree appropriate terms for using Nokia technology and has been seeking a free ride on Nokia’s innovation since it shipped the first iPhone in 2007.”
Both Nokia and Apple allege a lot of patent infringements on each other and allege both have copied stuff without acknowledging or paying royalties.
Nokia says that over the past two decades it has spent some 40 billion euros ($57.5 billion) on R&D and has amassed “one of the wireless industry’s strongest and broadest IPR portfolios, with over 11,000 patent families.”