HTC Corp., Taiwan’s largest smartphone maker, has agreed to pay royalties to Nokia Oyj to end a patent-infringement dispute that could have resulted in its devices being kept out of the U.S. market.
Financial terms of the settlement weren’t disclosed. Each company will gain access to the other’s patented technology and will explore “future technology collaboration opportunities,” they said Friday in a statement. The U.S. International Trade Commission in Washington was scheduled to announce today whether it would issue an import ban on HTC devices.
“This agreement validates Nokia’s implementation patents and enables us to focus on further licensing opportunities,” Paul Melin, chief intellectual property officer at Espoo, Finland-based Nokia, said in the statement.
Nokia was once the world’s largest maker of mobile phones, only to see its title collapse as customers flocked to the design and technology advancements in Samsung Electronics Co. and Apple Inc. devices. Nokia is selling its phone business to Microsoft Corp., a deal that’s expected to close this quarter, to focus on networking equipment. It has retained patents on fundamental phone technology as part of a program to try and recoup the billions of dollars it spent on research.
An International Trade Commission judge in September found that HTC infringed two Nokia patents for a way to remove errors in radio signals and a process to deal with different radio frequencies. No infringement was found of a third Nokia patent for a way to transmit data from a computer to a mobile phone, which Google Inc. helped Taoyuan, Taiwan-based HTC challenge. It was directed at phones running on Google’s Android operating system.
Business, Pages 21 on 02/10/2014