More bad news for Nokia: IPCom wins patent case in German court
A regional court in Mannheim found Nokia to have violated patents belonging to a German patent firm named IPCom.
Nokia can't catch a break.
The Finnish mobile company today lost a court battle with German patent firm IPCom. A Mannheim regional court judge said Nokia violated a mobile patent IPCom holds in mobile phones that the company previously sold. The patent relates to emergency services.
Reuters, which first reported on the news, spoke with a Nokia spokesman who said that the affected devices are no longer on store shelves. In addition, the spokesman told Reuters that current devices are not affected by the infringement because they "use different methods" than those described in the patents.
Today's ruling follows another that Nokia lost against IPCom last year in the U.K. High Court. In that case, Nokia was found to have infringed a patent related to the prioritization of emergency and security services. That same patent was the focus of today's ruling.
Nokia's legal ding comes just a day after the company announced that it lost more than $1 billion during the first quarter of 2012 as demand for its devices continues to slip. Meanwhile, the company's shares have dipped to $3.73 as of this writing, representing a massive 57 percent decline in the last year.