Samsung appears to be surrounded on all fronts in the smartphone patent wars. The latest company to take issue with South Korean tech giant is Ericsson.
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The mobile and networking infrastructure giant, says AllThingsD is suing Samsung, claiming that the company has continued using its technology despite the fact that their mobile licensing agreement has expired.
According to Ericsson the suit comes after two years of failed negotiations with Samsung, during which the latter tried to significantly reduce the licensing fees it was paying to the Swedish company under fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) terms.
“Ericsson has tried long and hard to amicably come to an agreement with Samsung and to sign a license agreement on FRAND terms,” Ericsson’s chief intellectual property officer Kasim Alfalahi said. “We have turned to litigation as a last resort.”
Samsung meanwhile says that Ericsson has been the one holding up the process because it’s not offering the licensing agreement under the right terms.
“Ericsson has demanded prohibitively higher royalty rates to renew the same patent portfolio,” Samsung said in its own statement. “As we cannot accept such extreme demands, we will take all necessary legal measures to protect against Ericsson’s excessive claims.”
The Swedish company isn’t messing around here either. The company claims that Samsung has sold hundreds of millions of unlicensed devices and it wants compensation on all of them.
