Qualcomm and Nokia end fight and settle on patents

By Tim Conneally | Published July 24, 2008, 12:30 PM

Since 2006, Finnish Cell phone producer Nokia and California chipmaker Qualcomm have been engaged in an intellectual property battle which began as a disagreement over patent licensing royalties. Just as the two companies were scheduled for a federal trial, they reached an amicable solution.

Yestderday, Nokia and Qualcomm announced that they had entered a 15-year agreement covering GSM, EDGE, CDMA, WCDMA, HSDPA, OFDM, WiMAX, LTE and "other technologies." This came at almost the same time as the announcement that a German court -- the third body, in addition to the UK High Court and The US International Trade Commission-- had ruled that Qualcomm's GSM patent suit against Nokia was invalid.

In the agreement, Nokia has been given license to use all of Qualcomm's patents in its devices, both on the consumer end and in infrastructure. In exchange, Nokia transferred ownership of several of its own foundational patents to Qualcomm and agreed to pay royalties both upfront and ongoing.

Nokia has also agreed to drop the claim it filed with the European Commission against Qualcomm alleging anticompetitive practices.

In a statement yesterday, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs said, "This agreement paves the way for enhanced opportunities between the companies in a number of areas."

Analysts have recently remarked that one of the areas where Nokia could benefit, at least in the US, is in enterprise smartphones. The company has typically excelled in the luxury and feature phone categories, and has only recently made a stronger push into that market with the release of its E series devices.

For Qualcomm, however, this marks the end of only one of the company's long-standing patent disputes; the frequent run-ins with Broadcom intellectual properties continue. The two companies last week entered the Appellate Court over a May 2007 judgement that certain Qualcomm chipsets infringe upon three Broadcom patents.