Nokia Corp. has filed claims in the United States and Germany alleging that products from HTC, RIM and Viewsonic infringe a number of Nokia patents. The patents cover all fundamental aspects of today's cell phones, media tablets and other similar devices.

The company indicated that Nokia proprietary innovations protected by 45 patents are being used by the companies to enable hardware capabilities such as dual function antennas, power management and multimode radios, as well as to enhance software features including application stores, multitasking, navigation, conversational message display, dynamic menus, data encryption and retrieval of email attachments on a mobile device.

"Nokia is a leader in many technologies needed for great mobile products. We have already licensed our standards essential patents to more than 40 companies. Though we would prefer to avoid litigation, Nokia had to file these actions to end the unauthorized use of our proprietary innovations and technologies, which have not been widely licensed," said Louise Pentland, chief legal officer at Nokia.

Nokia's actions include a complaint to the U.S. international trade commission (ITC) against HTC; suits against HTC and Viewsonic in the federal district court of Delaware, U.S.; against HTC and RIM in the regional court in Dusseldorf, Germany; and against all three companies in the regional courts in Mannheim and Munich, Germany. In total, 45 Nokia patents are in suit in one or more of the actions.

"Many of these inventions are fundamental to Nokia products. We would rather [prefer] that other companies respect our intellectual property and compete using their own innovations, but as these actions show, we will not tolerate the unauthorized use of our inventions," added Ms. Pentland.

Tags: Nokia, HTC, RIM, Blackberry, Viewsonic