Context: Early last year, Nokia completed its major smartphone license renewal cycle, which also included (already a year earlier) Samsung (February 8, 2024 ip fray article and January 23, 2023 Nokia press release). The focus has since shifted to new types of licensing opportunities such as multimedia and IoT. Nokia has already won a couple of cases in which Amazon products are held to infringe its patents, and could win a case against Amazon’s Prime video streaming service early next month (January 9, 2025 ip fray article). Nokia has licensed its video-related standard-essential patents (SEPs) to others such as HP and a couple of unnamed streaming services (October 30, 2024 ip fray article). Samsung already licensed Nokia’s multimedia patents four years ago (March 11, 2021 Nokia press release).
What’s new: Nokia just announced that it “has signed a multi-year patent license agreement with Samsung covering the use of Nokia’s video technologies in Samsung’s televisions.” The exact terms are not known, other than Samsung obviously paying an unspecified amount of royalties and the deal having a multi-year term. This is presumably a renewal, maybe with a modified scope as technology has evolved, of the 2021 Nokia-Samsung multimedia patent license agreement.
Direct impact: Nokia’s licensing programs continue to have momentum on multiple fronts.
Wider ramifications: With respect to the contractual relationship between Nokia and Samsung, it is possible that cellular and multimedia patents will be licensed separately, with different renewal dates, or whether the next renewal will be a total-portfolio license. It can work either way. In its dispute Ericsson, Lenovo argues that it should receive separate offers for wireless and multimedia patents, though it raised the issue rather late, which may have been inconducive to its credibility (see item 2 of this December 9, 2024 ip fray article).
Nokia’s press release quotes the company’s Chief Licensing Officer New Segments, Arvin Patel, as follows:
“We are delighted to have reached an agreement with Samsung covering the use of our video technologies in their world-class TVs. The agreement is yet another proof point of Nokia’s leadership in video and multimedia technologies, and further validation of our decades-long investments in multimedia R&D and standardization.”
For Samsung, a dispute with Nokia would have been as unnecessary as it must have been undesirable. Samsung gets sued regularly, over SEPs as well as non-SEPs. Yesterday, the first “Vintage Year 2025” Unified Patent Court (UPC) patent infringement lawsuit surfaced, and it’s a ZTE v. Samsung case (January 14, 2025 LinkedIn post by ip fray).