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 and networking equipment as its business many years ago, and reminded people of it with last year’s logo redesign. Companies paying Nokia licensing fees include HTC, Apple, and more recently, Oppo.
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.