[Vijin]

Few thoughts on this from my side:
- Nokia is not a dead company, its network products ( widely used by telecom operators for deploying 2G to 5G mobile networks) generated a revenue of 23 billion USD in 2019.
- Nokia is not acting like a patent troll here, this is a common practise. The royalties payable are usually a percentage of end product, so Bosch/Continental paying Nokia royalties directly, based on price of component, is cheaper than Daimler paying royalties based on entire value of car.
(Similar to Qualcomm vs Apple, where Apple had to fold up and pay - link )

[Zed]

Originally Posted by n_ramesh99

. As a rule of thumb, a $ spend on the Bill of Materials (BOM) would result in a cost of 3$ to the end customer. So, this would represent approximately 50$ for the product.

Is there any reference for this "BOM impact to end customer price" yardstick? Is it country or segment specific ? I am not challenging your statement, just want to have the context.

[n_ramesh99]

Originally Posted by Zed

Is there any reference for this "BOM impact to end customer price" yardstick? Is it country or segment specific ? I am not challenging your statement, just want to have the context.

This is from my experience. Currently I work for a consumer electronics company that is US based and previously used to work for European electronics major (at that time). I have had opportunity to review the costing sheet for the products when I worked for that company and this is what I used to take as a yard stick. I am not sure about how much applicable this figure for other industry is. I am not aware of whether there is any published data on this.

Let me also clarify my statement on patent quote. In the company that I referred above we used to take 40K US$ as the cost per patent. In the current company we take it as 25K US$. The unwritten rule is that if we feel that the patent is not worth that much money, we do not file for patent for that IP disclosure.

[adwaith]

Originally Posted by avira_tk

They can't ask for anything, and the patent is worth what the end user pays. Nokia is a patent troll at this point. I can't remember the last time I considered a Nokia smartphone, if they made them (before the Chinese revival) Why should Daimler stop selling cars because of a disputed patent?

I don't have to be acquainted with the process to have an opinion about it. Patents have a long history of abuse, luckily India didn't recognise medical patents that helped make medicines affordable, that's where I'm coming from.

A patent, like any other property, can be sold at whatever price the owner wants. It's up to the buyer if he wants it or not. Protection to intellectual property is what incentivizes inventions and innovation. Without it there would be no reason for one to put in time and effort and employ other resources to come up with a new technology. The life of a patent ends in 20 years from date of first disclosure. This is to ensure that after the 20 years(20 years is considered to be a generation), the next generation of technology has access to these patented technology to innovate and move further.

Section 3(i) of the Patents Act, 1970, does bar medicines and surgical procedures etc from being patented but there are other ways to patent it. The monopoly is granted to the inventors by the public in exchange for the disclosure of the invention made by them. The disclosure is necessary for the next generation of technology to come about.

Daimler don't have to stop selling cars, but they will have to stop using Nokia's patented technology and also pay Nokia for whatever they have used until now. Nothing is really unfair about this. This is the accepted practice globally.

You wouldn't say the same thing if Daimler profited off the usufructs of Nokia's land without paying Nokia their due.

[AZT]

Update on this:

Daimler to pay Nokia patent fees, ending legal fight

The agreement announced jointly with Daimler on Tuesday marks the latest win for Nokia which in April struck a deal with China’s Lenovo under which the world’s biggest PC maker would make a net balancing payment to the Finnish telecoms equipment maker and resolve all pending litigation.

That followed a deal with Samsung the previous month in which the South Korean company agreed to make royalty payments for its technologies related to video standards.

...

Audi, Bentley, BMW, Mini, Porsche, Rolls Royce, Seat, Skoda, Volkswagen and Volvo are already paying patent fees to Nokia.