We're witnessing the third stage of Nokia's decline. First it failed to stay competitive in the handset business. Then its business model turned ever more trollish and its patent litigation strategies ever more abusive. The third and latest downturn is that Nokia is now abusing not only its patents, but also its procedural options in litigation.
Throughout almost 11 years of blogging about patent litigation, I have acknowledged on numerous occasions when parties played the litigation game smart. Very recently, I even gave automotive supplier Continental credit for an interesting strategy in a Delaware state court, even though I bashed them in 2019 for their U.S. antisuit motion (which indeed went nowhere). Up to a certain point, litigants--whether plaintiffs or defendants--are simply in their right to exercise their procedural rights for tactical purposes. But beyond that point, such behavior is no longer legitimate, even if it is still technically legal. For example, trolls that file dozens of cases against a single defendant over the course of a few months--or simultaneously sue hundreds of defendants--give patent assertion a bad name. I still have the greatest respect for the skills of Nokia's in-house litigators and outside counsel, but in recent months it has gone a bit too far with its withdrawals of cases just on the eve of trials or decisions.
In December, Nokia dropped two patent infringement cases against Daimler in Dusseldorf just before trial (at a point where the court presumably had already spent a lot of time studying the pleadings and preparing the trial), only to refile in Munich. And now, just before Presiding Judge Dr. Thomas Kuehnen ("Kühnen" in German) of one of the patent-specialized divisions of the Dusseldorf Higher Regional Court was going to rule on Nokia's interlocutory appeal of the lower Dusseldorf court's preliminary reference to the European Court of Justice, Nokia has withdrawn its appeal. Today a spokesman for the Dusseldorf appeals court informed me by email (appellate case no. 2 W 21/21).
From the beginning, Nokia knew that this interlocutory appeal was a bit of a long shot. Its appeal talked in more detail about whether it was admissible at all than about the question at issue. After the lower court didn't reconsider, this went up to the regional appeals court, and was assigned to the Second Civil Senate, whose aforementioned presiding judge took a very clear position on component-level SEP licensing in an article he published in GRUR, the leading German IP law journal, in 2019. For Judge Dr. Kuehnen, the order on Nokia's interlocutory appeal, which he had presumably been working on for some time, would have been an opportunity to provide his input to the top EU court. Not so anymore. Nokia abused the appellate process to engage in stalling, and apparently never really wanted a decision by the regional appeals court.
When pursuing its infringement cases, Nokia can't wait to get rulings (with the exception of those infringement cases it dropped in Dusseldorf because it probably expected them to be stayed, if not rejected). It's typically the defendants to those infringement complaints who seek to extend filng deadlines, move to file post-trial briefs, and so forth. It would have been better for Nokia's credibility to act consistently, as opposed to stalling in Dusseldorf while insisting on speedy dispute resolution in other venues.
The question of component-level licensing is the key issue in Nokia's--and various other parties'--automotive patent cases. Whether one prefers one outcome of that ECJ referral or another, clarification will help, and if the ECJ ruling provides clarification (there is always a risk of a decision raising new questions), licensing negotiations will benefit from such guidance. Why does Nokia prefer to delay such resolution? Are they so worried they're going to lose? Is Nokia's plan to gain leverage over Daimler in some infringement case in the meantime? In light of a key appellate decision Nokia lost in Karlsruhe (where all appeals from Mannheim go) on Friday (which I'll discuss in the next post), it's just become even harder for Nokia to enforce any SEP injunction against Daimler in the near term.
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