11mo ago

Nokia tells Reddit it might be infringing on Nokia's patents.

www.theverge.com Nokia tells Reddit it might be infringing on Nokia's patents.

In an amended SEC filing ahead of its IPO, Reddit warned potential investors that "...on March 18, 2024, Nokia Technologies sent us a letter indicating they believed that Reddit infringes certain of their patents. We will evaluate their claims." Nokia, of course, leaned into, ahem, patent licensing...

I can't believe I have to defend reddit for once.

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66 comments

Why are we mad about an active tech company protecting their IP?
Patent trolls buy up more patents than any company could ever be able to use in actual products in order to make money sueing everyone under the sun or striking extortionate licensing deals.
Nokia Oyj is the part of Nokia that Microsoft didn't buy, and it is a telecom company that does its own RnD to this day, and is perfectly open to doing reasonable licensing deals. How tf does this make them a patent troll, unless this is over something dumb and frivolous, which we don't know yet?
- We don’t even know what the suit is about, so I don’t know how anyone can pick a side about anything.
  
  I'll be ready to flip the second it comes out if this suit is BS.
  But I'm initially siding with Nokia Oyj here because they have a decent track record of actually doing the legwork on their tech, advancing the science, and sharing that with the industry through sane licensing.
  Also the company is one of the success stories of my country, so maybe I'm biased, but then that hasn't stopped me from hating exploitative pieces of shit like Rovio and Supercell.
  
  I’m just going to wait until I hear the details of the suit. At this point I don’t really understand the point of picking a side when we have almost no information.
  
  Fair enough. And I'm absolutely far more interested in convincing people to just not jump to "patent troll" with this little to go on.
  And preferably not spreading misinfo like "nokia is just a microsoft puppet" when this is about the part of the company that MS never even acquired.
  
  The point is that spez is a colossal fucking asshole and Nokia has never wronged me.
- Nokia is a husk of a former tech company that was gutted by Microsoft for anti competitive reasons and now used as a patent troll arm of Microsoft.
  https://slidebean.com/story/microsoft-nokia-acquisition
  
  That's not even close to the full story, and partly straight up incorrect.
  They sold their mobile branch. The brand of which eventually ended up with HMD global, which now makes Nokia branded phones.
  Nokia Oyj is a telecom RnD and infrastructure company, as in the hardware and standards behind wireless communication tech. They never stopped.
  They essentially pulled an IBM and exited the consumer market, but they never ceased operation, or sold off their main business.
  Microsoft has had absolutely nothing to do with Nokia Oyj since buying their consumer handset branch off them.
  
  And even back when Microsoft bought the mobile phone operations the company making the phones was Microsoft Mobile and Microsoft only leased the brand name from Nokia to use on their mobile phones for 10 years - same as with HMD Global today.
  
  That is entirely incorrect. Microsoft doesn't own the company and never did. MS bought the phone division and a license for the name to go with it.
  I tried to look up what this notice is actually about, but there's nothing out there yet. So can't say much being a patent troll "arm" either.
  
  And reddit is a husk of a former tech company who doesn't even have a good excuse for why they've gotten consistently worse over the last decade.
  
  They're not really a husk, they're doing all the things they ever did. And a lot more... Which we really wish they hadn't
  Reddit is more like a twisted/undead version of a tech company... It's still moving and growing, it just has been taken over by the lust to corrupt the living and drain their sanity
  
  That’s sad.
  
  And inaccurate. MS never bought Nokia in its entirety, the parts it did acquire languished for a while, with the brand eventually ending up with HMD Global. That is the company that makes Nokia phones today, and they're doing ok.
  The company that's relevant in this patent dispute is Nokia Oyj, the main operations of which is telecom RnD and infrastructure, and it has nothing to do with MS aside from being the company that they bought a mobile phone division from.

66 comments