Samsung has fired the latest salvo in its IPR battle with Ericsson, claiming the Swedish giant tried to increase the fees for its patent licences bybns of dollars when previous agreements expired in 2007.
The Korean firm made its latest claim in a document filed with the US International Trade Commission this week. Ericsson wants the ITC to ban the import of Samsung’s Galaxy S III, Galaxy Note and Galaxy Tab 7.7 devices, and other products such as smart TVs. It alleges that these offerings infringe on its patents and filed suit in US District Court in Texas, and at the ITC, late last year. The patents relate to a broad range of technologies including GSM/EDGE, W-CDMA, LTE and Wi-Fi.
Like many of the ongoing IPR battles between large mobile players, there is confusion over the issue of standards-essential patents (SEP). Since OEMs cannot generally avoid using these technologies, they are required to be licensed on Frand (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory) terms, but there is no firm rule on how those terms are defined. Ericsson claims Samsung is using its SEP without a licence and was offered the same terms as other firms. But its antagonist claims the fees demanded would have broken Frand rules.
“At trial, Samsung is prepared to show Ericsson’s offers to license its SEPs after the expiration of the parties’ 2007 license agreement are unreasonably high ‘ seekingbns more than the previous licence agreements – and that these offers are inconsistent with FRAND,” said Samsung in its ITC filing. It also noted that negotiations about the companies’ patent portfolios are still ongoing round the world, and that it has made cross-licensing proposals, since it also holds IPR in cellular and Wi-Fi standards.
“In those negotiations, Samsung has made multiple offers to Ericsson. While those offers apparently do not include enough money for Ericsson, they do reflect a vast and principled increase in licensing revenue from Samsung to Ericsson over the prior two licences combined,” Samsung said, adding that this could not be characterized as a “refusal to negotiate’.
“Ericsson’s suggestion that the ITC could and should enter the business of setting unilateral FRAND royalty rates, on a portfolio-wide basis, for patent licensing companies like Ericsson, thus encouraging unwarranted SEP litigation in the ITC, is wrong,” Samsung went on, referring to an earlier Ericsson filing.
In another high profile IPR-related battle, between Oracle and Google, the latter’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt has rekindled the argument. He said the claims by Oracle chief Larry Ellison that Android illegally uses Oracle code (acquired when the database supplier bought Sun and its Java technology) are ‘simply untrue’.
In a post on the Google+ social network, Schmidt called for patent law reform and responded to recent comments by Ellison, that Google had been ‘absolutely evil’ in what it did with Android and Java. Schmidt added: “Patents were designed to encourage invention, not stop the development of new ideas and technologies.’