The legal firings across the noses part of the Apple Nokia battles over the former’s alleged patent violations has already escalated from ‘interesting’ to ‘he said she said’ to ‘downright ugly’, but now it’s becoming truly childish, with Apple pulling out all of Nokia’s Withings products from its website.
Withings, a French connected health gadgets company, was purchased by Nokia in the middle of this year for about $190 million. Until now these digital bathroom scales, smart thermometers and other products could be bought online on Apple’s site. Today, if you check the site for any of these products, all you’ll find is an error message.
But just in case you haven’t been following the Apple Nokia story, here’s the gist. Nokia sued Apple in 2009 for patent violations and, in 2011, Apple settled with them and licensed some key technologies.
More recently, Nokia asked them to once again take licenses, but Apple says Nokia isn’t asking for a fair price on these licenses. A few days ago, Apple sued Nokia and several of its patent assertion entities.
In retaliation Nokia is now suing them in 11 countries for no less than 40 patent violations. Apple is now calling Nokia a patent troll and says that it will fight for inventors all over the world.
SEE: Apple Sued Nokia 1 Day before Nokia Sued Apple, Did You Know?
What’s the outcome going to be? We don’t know, but in all likelihood, a few violations will be thrown out of court, a few will stick, Apple may pay something to Nokia toward licensing and Nokia will be the worse for it because this thing is going to drag on for years. Apple can afford that, but Nokia barely can.
This new development of “I’m not going to sell your stuff because your sister stole my lunch” with Withings wasn’t really necessary. It’s not like Apple is going to shut Nokia down by not selling its goods. What it does do is show the deep animosity between the two companies that goes beyond childish behavior.
Whether or not Apple is infringing on their rights is disputable, and for the courts to decide. But Nokia’s position right now is that, with so many patents in their name, they could be looking at antitrust violations in their own home ground of Europe now. The European Commissioner for Competition is already looking closely at the situation after the U.S. lawsuit against the company, so things aren’t looking that good for the Finnish paper mill that subsequently became the world’s top cell phone maker.
At this point, we can’t expect any comments from either company, but with lawsuits now spanning 11 countries in a matter of two days, we should see some new developments very soon from the Apple Nokia battlefield.
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