Five years after burying the hatchet with Apple, Nokia’s back at it again. The one-time phone-making juggernaut announced this week that it’s ready to go back to court in a big way, filing multiple lawsuits aimed squarely at Cupertino.
The company celebrated the filings with a press release detailing the claims, which stem from 32 patents related to a wide range of related technologies, including software, video coding, chipsets, display, UI and antenna, among others — from the sound of it, just about everything apart from the big shiny Apple logo on the back of the iPhone.
According to Nokia, Apple has refused to play ball with subsequent patents following the 2011 settlement, which marked the end of a two-year fight. “Since agreeing [to] a license covering some patents from the Nokia Technologies portfolio in 2011,” the company said in a statement issued today, “Apple has declined subsequent offers made by Nokia to license other of its patented inventions which are used by many of Apple’s products.”
Nokia filed suits in three German cities, along with the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, the Walt Disney World of patent litigation. For its part, Apple also filed a suit this week in California, alleging that Nokia removed certain patents from the previous deal for the purposes of “extorting excessive royalties” — an alleged breach of contract.
The previous settlement was reportedly valued at $720 million.
Update: We’ve since spoken with Apple in regard to the suit by the company yesterday in California, in which it suggests that Nokia is working with a number of companies on the aforementioned royalty “extort[ion].”
“Apple is about innovation and our teams are dedicated to making the best products on earth,” the spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We respect intellectual property and we’ve always been willing to pay a fair price to secure the rights of patents covering technology in our products. Unfortunately, Nokia has refused to license their patents on a fair basis and is now using the tactics of a patent troll to attempt to extort money from Apple by applying a royalty rate to Apple’s own inventions they had nothing to do with. We are standing up for inventors everywhere by fighting this flagrant anticompetitive practice.”
We’ve also reached out to Nokia for a comment about what’s shaping up to be another fierce battle stemming from some unfinished business between the two big tech names.