Amazon escalates patent lawfare with Nokia

First reported on by Reuters, Amazon’s lawsuit alleges that Nokia is infringing on a bunch of its patents to do with the cloud. The filing specifies the following areas where it reckons Nokia is infringing:

Virtual Networking Infrastructure: managing communications in virtual networks and emulating physical devices to create virtual devices that can be used for virtual networking.

Virtual Networking Security: managing security across virtual networks as well as providing secure access to virtual networks from remote locations.

Virtual Networking Performance: techniques for effectively supporting and exploiting virtual networking technology, for example, using network scaling.

Distributed Program Execution & Management: serverless computing for allowing cloud platforms to dynamically allocate, scale, and manage resources used for executing distributed programs in both virtual and physical environments.

At the end of October 2023 Nokia ‘commenced legal action against Amazon for the unauthorized use of Nokia’s video-related technologies in its streaming services and devices,’ announced Nokia Chief Licensing Officer Arvin Patel in a blog. This will have come from Nokia’s IP licensing division, which seeks to extract revenue from mainly the legacy mobile technologies it developed when it was the world’s preeminent mobile phone company.

It seems Amazon took that action personally, choosing to sneer at Nokia’s dramatic collapse in that market in its filing. “Nokia is best known for its mass production of cellular telephones, first introduced in 1992,” it wrote. “However, with the advent of smartphones developed by Apple and Samsung, among others, Nokia’s prominence in the mobile phone market has plummeted.

“Nokia’s failure to anticipate the importance of smartphone technology led it to the verge of bankruptcy in 2013. To save the company, Nokia exited the mobile device business in 2014—an act its board chairman referred to as a “moment of reinvention”—and pivoted to the sale of 5G network infrastructure and associated services that it acquired from Alcatel-Lucent in 2016.”

It goes on to explain how Nokia eventually decided to give cloud computing a go, but alleges it could only do so by ‘leveraging Amazon’s innovative solutions, including Amazon’s patented technology’. It singles out Nokia CloudBand and Nokia Nuage Networks specific offenders.

There are a few problems with the above section of the filing, however. Firstly, 5G didn’t exist in 2014 and, secondly, Nokia was already in the mobile networking business thanks to Nokia Siemens Networks, which Nokia acquired full ownership of in 2013. Also, Nokia began exiting much of its cloud business last year, transferring its customers instead to Red Hat.

Amazon’s decision to adopt such a derisory tone is especially awkward when you consider AWS and Nokia are working in partnership to help out Telefónica Germany with its cloud core. As Light Reading observes, lawsuits such as this at least call into question the viability of such multivendor cloud arrangements. How can they effectively collaborate when they apparently don’t even trust each other?

This seems like one of those tit-for-tat countersuits designed primarily to create legal jeopardy for the original litigant, in the hope the two suits eventually cancel each other out. As ever, the real beneficiaries will be the lawyers, who will be paid millions of dollars to trot out boilerplate platitudes about how people shouldn’t nick stuff. Nice work if you can get it and can tolerate the arcane tedium of it all.