Deny 'Consideration’ of Nokia’s Lenovo Exclusion Request, App Association Urges ITC

No company “has an obligation to commit its patents to a standard,” commented the App Association Monday (login required) in opposition to Nokia’s Tariff Act Section 337 complaint at the International Trade Commission alleging Lenovo laptops, tablets and desktop PCs infringe four H.264 patents, plus a fifth on data search and discovery (see 2007080048). When a company volunteers to commit its patents to a standard, “as Nokia has,” the “promise” it makes to the standard-setting organization to license the intellectual property on fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) terms “acts as a crucial constraint on the abuse of market power” associated with standards-essential patents (SEPs), said the group. App Association members “rely on a competitive information and communications technology hardware environment, specifically with respect to SEP licensing,” it said. Without that, members would be “significantly hampered” in providing U.S. consumers and enterprises “with leading-edge software and hardware products and services that require an increasing amount of bandwidth and computing power to meet customer demands,” it said. The exclusion order Nokia seeks “should only receive consideration” when a licensee is “demonstrably acting unreasonable” or is acting “outside of the scope of the SEP holder’s voluntary FRAND commitment,” said the association. Lenovo is guilty of neither, it said: “SEP holders denied an exclusion order do not become disenfranchised as they have the ability to recover monetary damages through the courts.”