Nokia blocks Lenovo from selling any laptops, PCs or tablets in Germany and is seeking similar injunctions in Brazil, India and the US

[Redaktion]

Lenovo has had to remove almost all its products from its German website, because of a patent dispute with Nokia. The Chinese company has supposedly been violating H.264 patents that Nokia holds, resulting in the Finnish company taking out an injunction to freeze Lenovo's online sales.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Nokia-blocks-Lenovo-from-selling-any-laptops-PCs-or-tablets-in-Germany-and-is-seeking-similar-injunctions-in-Brazil-India-and-the-US.498969.0.html

[vertigo]

This will be interesting to follow. Good on Nokia for enforcing their IP, something many Chinese companies don't respect at all, yet most companies just look the other way. Now to see if Lenovo settles up or if they're willing to lose a lot of money in sales just to push the issue.

[rcrcrc]

Jeez Lenovo just use the royalty free AV1 compression format for your video. Join the Alliance for Open Media club and ditch the shameless patent abuser H264 and H265 codec. Shame that Nokia has stoop so low that it blocks other companies' sales of unrelated product just because they encode their promotional video using H264 format on their website. Talk about IP Patent abuser.

[A]

@rcrcrc - AV1 is a bit difficult cause only chrome so far supports it and Firefox if you enable hidden flags. Not to mention most hardware don't have hardware acceleration.

But WebM/VP8 or VP9 is an option that all browsers other than Safari supports. Actually, Safari also supports WebM, they just intentionally limited it to webrtc only. They might be able to go around it by simple making a webrtc workaround for safari users, not that they would be their customers anyways.

VP8 hardware decoding goes all the way back to broadwell (2014) which is pretty much most computers out there being able to hardware decode it (older would software decode ofcourse)

[Jellybean]

Jeez Lenovo just use the royalty free AV1 compression format for your video. Join the Alliance for Open Media club and ditch the shameless patent abuser H264 and H265 codec. Shame that Nokia has stoop so low that it blocks other companies' sales of unrelated product just because they encode their promotional video using H264 format on their website. Talk about IP Patent abuser.

And I almost thought I'd never see someone defending Chinese companies for stealing other companies technology and using it for free.
Way to go!

[anan]

This article incorrectly states that lenovo was sued for using patented technology on "it's website". In fact it was sued for infringing Nokia patents on Lenovo products (laptops, phones, etc).
This is standard practice in this industry: most likely Nokia approached Lenovo to license the tech; they could not agree on a price and a lawsuit was filed. This was the case for all android phone manufacturers. Everyone was sued since this tech involves FRAND patents and there is at least a chance that a judge will force Nokia to lower it's price. Nokia in turn wants to force injunctions and drag the case so that Lenovo would cave in and agree to a pricier licensing deal. There is no chance of Lenovo winning the case - only the chance of them lowering the licensing cost. Nokia is not in jeopardy of paying damages for the injunction since there is not chance for the patents in question to be invalidated and the price they requested cannot be judged as a bad faith action.
This case is all about the licensing cost. Nokia is trying to strong-arm Lenovo into paying more.
Most likely there is no technical workaround for Lenovo around the infringing tech. AV1 is royalty free but media patent holders will find find infringing tech in it. The only reason we haven't seen lawsuits involving this codec is because no one can release a product without h264 support.