Nokia and Lenovo settle years-long patent spat

Nokia's HQ with dark clouds above
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Nokia has settled a long-running patent dispute with laptop manufacturer Lenovo, pending litigation across a number of jurisdictions, both companies have confirmed.

The terms of the cross-licensing agreement are confidential, but the deal relates to Lenovo's alleged infringement of 20 video-compression technology patents belonging to Nokia, according to Reuters.

Nokia told IT Pro that the Reuters report was a "fair" summary of the case. The Finnish telecoms company launched legal action against Lenovo in 2019 and had cases in the United States, Brazil and India, in addition to six cases in Germany.

A court in Munich ruled in September that Lenovo did infringe one of Nokia's patents and ordered an injunction and recall of products from the laptop giant, an order was stayed in November by a German appeals court. Separately, Lenovo has also sued Nokia in a Californian court.

The terms of the settlement will see Lenovo make a net balancing payment to Nokia, the telecom giant said.

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"The agreement reflects Nokia's decades-long investments in R&D and contributions to cellular and multimedia standards," Jenni Lukander, president of Nokia Technologies, said. "We appreciate, and very much respect, the constructive spirit Lenovo brought to our negotiations and look forward to working together to bring further innovation to their users around the world."

Nokia's has around 20,000 patents in its portfolio, with over 3,500 of those listed as essential to 5G technology, and last month the firm struck a deal with Samsung to license patents covering video standards.

"Our agreement with Nokia reflects the value of both Nokia's technology leadership and Lenovo's continued investment in 5G innovation," John Mulgrew, chief intellectual property officer of Lenovo, said. "The global accord struck will enable future collaboration between our companies for the benefit of customers worldwide."

Bobby Hellard

Bobby Hellard is ITPro's Reviews Editor and has worked on CloudPro and ChannelPro since 2018. In his time at ITPro, Bobby has covered stories for all the major technology companies, such as Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook, and regularly attends industry-leading events such as AWS Re:Invent and Google Cloud Next.

Bobby mainly covers hardware reviews, but you will also recognise him as the face of many of our video reviews of laptops and smartphones.