Mobile and video tech developer Interdigital has filed patent infringement action against Lenovo in the UK because they can’t agree a price for use of its 4G patents.

Scott Bicheno

August 29, 2019

3 Min Read
Legal gavel and smartphone

Mobile and video tech developer Interdigital has filed patent infringement action against Lenovo in the UK because they can’t agree a price for use of its 4G patents.

Perhaps wary of being labelled a patent troll, Interdigital is keen to stress that this is the first patent infringement litigation it has initiated for six years. It claims its hand has been forced after the failure of almost a decade of negotiation with Lenovo, which makes Motorola phones as well as its own-branded devices.

Interdigital reckons it owns around 10% of the standards-essential patents in both 3G and 4G technology, which means it gets a piece of the action whenever someone sells a device that uses them. How much users of these patents have to pay is usually determined on a FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory) basis, but apparently Lenovo won’t even accept third party FRAND arbitration.

Patent litigation canned comments are among the most formulaic, but let’s have a look anyway. “Having product companies take fair licenses to patented technologies flowing out of fundamental research is absolutely essential for the long-term success of worldwide standards like 4G and 5G,” said William Merritt, CEO of Interdigital.

“InterDigital has a long history of valuable technology innovation and patient, good faith negotiation and fair licensing practices, including our willingness to allow the economic terms of a FRAND license to be determined via binding neutral arbitration. We also have longstanding licensing relationships with many of the top companies in the mobile space, including successful license arrangements with Samsung, Apple, LG and Sony, among others.

“For our company, we turn to litigation only when we feel that negotiations are not being carried out in good faith. In bringing this claim in the UK High Court of Justice, which has a history of examining standards-essential patent issues, we are hopeful for a speedy resolution and a fair license.”

Here are the patents in question:

  • European Patent (UK) 2 363 008 – Enables the efficient control of carrier aggregation in 4G (LTE). In advanced mobile phones, carrier aggregation is key to achieving high data rates.

  • European Patent (UK) 2 557 714 – Supports the use of multiple antennae transmissions in 4G (LTE). The patent enables the use of flexible levels of error protection for reporting by the handset, increasing the reliability of the signaling.

  • European Patent (UK) 2 485 558 – Allows mobile phone users quick and efficient access to 4G (LTE) networks. One of the main technological challenges of developing LTE networks was efficient bandwidth usage for various traffic types such as VoIP, FTP and HTTP. This patent relates to inventions for quickly and efficiently requesting shared uplink resources — for example, reducing lag when requesting a webpage on a smartphone on LTE networks.

  • European Patent (UK) 2 421 318 – Decreases latency during HSUPA transmission by eliminating certain scenarios in HSUPA where scheduling requests may be blocked. A blocked scheduling request may prevent a smartphone from sending data.

Interdigital presumably has others that Lenovo is using in its devices, so either there’s no dispute over the them or Interdigital is focusing on the four juiciest ones, who knows? Patent litigation is pretty arcane stuff at the best of times, but it seems like Lenovo must have really pushed its luck for its relationship with Interdigital to come to this. It’s hard to see how they can justify refusing to go to FRAND arbitration, but there could well be extenuating circumstances that will come to light in due course.

About the Author(s)

Scott Bicheno

As the Editorial Director of Telecoms.com, Scott oversees all editorial activity on the site and also manages the Telecoms.com Intelligence arm, which focuses on analysis and bespoke content.
Scott has been covering the mobile phone and broader technology industries for over ten years. Prior to Telecoms.com Scott was the primary smartphone specialist at industry analyst Strategy Analytics’. Before that Scott was a technology journalist, covering the PC and telecoms sectors from a business perspective.
Follow him @scottbicheno

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