Nokia has sued Apple in 11 countries. Here is why?

Nokia said, it was suing Apple, accusing the iPhone maker of violating 32 technology patents. On Thursday, the Finnish telecoms equipment maker said it had now filed 40 patent suits. Nokia’s acted after Apple’s legal action targeting the one-time cellphone industry leader a day earlier.

Nokia Corp has said it has filed lawsuits against Apple Inc in 11 countries over 40 patents covering technologies such as displays, software and chipsets, in what can only be reminiscent of the Apple-Samsung battle.

Nokia said on Wednesday it was suing Apple, accusing the iPhone maker of violating 32 technology patents. On Thursday, the Finnish telecoms equipment maker said it had now filed 40 patent suits. Nokia’s acted after Apple’s legal action targeting the one-time cellphone industry leader a day earlier.

Nokia, which was the largest cellphone maker before being decimated by Apple and other Android handset makers, believes that the iPhone wouldn’t have been possible without it sharing its patents with Apple for royalty for the last few years.

The company claimed that it had filed the patents after putting in a lot of investment into research which it thinks need to come back from Apple.

The contract between Nokia and Apple that was scripted five years ago is about to expire on December 31. Apple has paid royalties during the last five years but Nokia wants it to keep paying for it along with licensing other additional patents that the Finnish company came up with.

However, Apple has said that Nokia’s demand qualify as extortion and is refusing to pay anything. But the lawsuits are the result of an impasse after two to three years of tense negotiations between the two companies.

“Apple is saying, we want to pay one low price and not have to deal with any of your patents again,” Clem Roberts, an intellectual property lawyer at Durie Tangri in San Francisco, told the New York Times (NYT). “Nokia is saying, ‘I don’t want that low price because my patents are worth more than that.’”

Another industry expert, on conditions of anonymity, said that the impasse signifies the struggle of erstwhile handset players like Motorola, Ericsson and Nokia to gain from the booming smartphone industry.

“Obviously, the iPhone was not created on a green field but was built on what others created before Apple,” Florian Mueller, a German iPhone app developer and former consultant to technology companies, was quoted as saying by the NYT. “On the other hand, the iPhone was a paradigm shift. It was more of a mobile computer than a mobile phone,” Mueller, who has followed the cell phone patent wars, added.

Patent-makers such as Nokia can now use a US supreme court ruling nearly 10 years ago, which said that patent owners had to stop selling their devices if the patent was violated, to their advantage.

Nokia’s shares were down nearly 5% at 4.496 euros on Thursday as analysts warned a legal battle with Apple could hold up royalty payments that are vital to shoring up the Finnish company’s profits.

Hiv cured with Bone marrow transplant

Aids Virus

 

At the beginning of the epidemic, immune suppression followed by a bone marrow transplant from a donor HIV-negative was proposed as a possible way to get rid of CD4 cells infected by HIV; an American activist even tried to transplant bone marrow from a baboon. A few people with AIDS who received bone marrow transplants before the advent of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) had undetectable HIV levels after the procedure, but over time the virus returned.

In 2007, French researchers reported on a man with HIV who were taking HAART and had an undetectable viral load in their blood before receiving a bone marrow transplant. After transplantation, ultrasensitive tests found no genetic material of HIV in more than one million cells tested. But after the man had to stop taking antiretroviral therapy due to drug toxicity, both viral load in blood and HIV proviral DNA in cells once again it became detectable.
 

immunosuppressive therapy for Hiv

However, in a case that quickly made headlines news, infected by HIV in Berlin man who stopped ART after a bone marrow transplant has remained virus free for 38 months, according to the most sensitive tests available. CD4 cells from the patient themselves seem to have disappeared entirely, presumably due to immunosuppressive therapy used, and replaced by cells produced from donated bone marrow.2

The researchers who conducted the operation and monitoring have now pronounced the man cured of HIV infection, but the procedure used in this case is unlikely to be possible in many people due to very grueling course of chemotherapy, and CCR5 -matched need for a matched bone marrow transplant.3


Researchers do not yet fully understand the reasons for this result; many features of the case shown in research to provide partial explanations. For example, the marrow donor had a rare genetic variation (one homozygous mutation CCR5-Delta32) resulting in a complete absence of co-receptors CCR5 on donor immune cells (and thus the "replacement" cells of the transplant recipient ). Despite the lack of co-receptors CCR5 protects these cells from infection by R5-tropic virus does not explain why not become infected with X4-tropic, which must still be susceptible to viruses, and had been identified in the recipient prior to transplantation.

Despite this and other unanswered questions, researchers are beginning to explore how CCR5-deficient cells can be transferred to patients or donors created through gene therapy techniques.