flexi-ble patents —

BlackBerry sues Nokia over patents as its phone business shuts down

Also at issue are Nortel patents from the $4.5B "Rockstar Bidco" purchase.

Nokia's Flexi Multiradio 10 base station, affixed to a brick wall. In a new lawsuit, the product has been accused of infringing Blackberry patents.
Enlarge / Nokia's Flexi Multiradio 10 base station, affixed to a brick wall. In a new lawsuit, the product has been accused of infringing Blackberry patents.

As it says goodbye to the smartphone business, BlackBerry is pushing ahead with an attempt to wring some cash from its patents.

The new salvo is a 96-page complaint (PDF) against Nokia, which accuses the Finnish telecom company of infringing 11 BlackBerry patents related to LTE- and UMTS/UTRAN-compliant products and services. The related products include Nokia's Flexi line of base stations and its Liquid Radio software.

The patents include number 8,494,090, "Detecting the number of transmit antennas in a base station," and No. 8,254,246, "Scattered pilot pattern and channel estimation system for MIMO-OFDM systems."

"In the course of developing its ground-breaking mobile communications devices, BlackBerry and its family of companies invented new technologies that cover key features of LTE and Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS)/UTRAN communications," write BlackBerry lawyers in the complaint. "To take one example, enabling seamless voice services for LTE users posed a critical challenge that BlackBerry was able to address."

Some of the patents in the lawsuit originated with Nortel Networks, including the oldest one in the group, number 6,996,418, which has a priority date of December 2000.

BlackBerry was part of Rockstar Consortium, a group of companies including Apple and Microsoft, which bought Nortel's patents for $4.5 billion and then created a special-purpose patent-assertion company to use them. Rockstar sued Google in 2013, and the case was settled on confidential terms the following year. Rockstar was purchased by patent aggregator RPX a short while later.

BlackBerry CEO John Chen told investors last May that he was in "licensing mode," and patent lawsuits against both Avaya and BLU Products were filed a few months later.

Court records show the Avaya litigation has been stayed following Avaya's declaration last month that it would declare bankruptcy. The case against BLU is moving ahead in Florida.

The lawsuit against Nokia was filed yesterday in federal court in Wilmington, Delaware, and was first reported by Bloomberg.

Channel Ars Technica