Apple has recently posted publicly the disclosed information of its initially confidential patent agreement with Nokia. This sudden turn of events comes on the heels of its constant battle against Samsung.
Earlier this year, Samsung presented the issue of the confidential agreement to the court to sway the court to recognize the misconduct of public knowledge of the information that Apple has created. The motivation for this act is that with the information of the agreement going public, it could cause the court to reduce the fees imposed on Quinn Emanuel. Quinn Emanuel was ordered to be responsible to pay for the cost of disclosing information regarding Apple and Nokia's agreements. Therefore this cost should be greatly reduced if the information has already been neglected in public's hand by Apple in the first place.
This is not the first time the inadvertent public filing of Apple's licensing terms has occurred. The terms with Nokia and NEC and at least two other instances of confidential business information it had with Samsung and Google was also publicly filed.
To me, this blatant neglect from both Apple and Samsung should be met with consequences. It is surprising that Nokia isn't the player that is more aggressive about the fault of the two parties but rather the two parties trying to find fault in each other's conduct
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It is interesting to me how intertwined all these firms are in patent warfare/agreements. The fact that Apple's agreement with Nokia, that was originally meant to be confidential is affecting Samsung just shows that any move, from litigation to licensing, really does affect more than just the two that we generally view as the "affected parties".
ReplyDeleteThis is just the continued battle between Samsung and Apple. Whether it be over patent infringement, or anything else, the two want to show a dominance. I think Apple tried to make a business move by making that agreement public. I'm surprised that Nokia also had nothing to say about this as you indicated in your blog post. I think Nokia wants to play neutral here rather than take one side or the other, because that could mean a one-directional patent sharing for Nokia in the future. Take for instance if Nokia wants to share patents with or sign an agreement with Samsung; if Nokia came into this battle as a player, they may not be able to participate in the future on deals with Samsung, if necessary. Likewise, the same could be said of Apple. This is going to get worse a battle before anything gets better.
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