Nokia of America Corporation did not infringe on a Dallas-area company’s patented technology used in routers, a federal East Texas jury in Marshall decided Wednesday following a six-day trial.
Jurors deliberated about an hour and a half before finding that Correct Transmission, which has an office in Allen, did not prove Nokia infringed three of its patents. The jury also rejected Nokia’s argument that one of the patents was invalid.
Correct Transmission had sought about $35 million in damages for the alleged infringement. Nokia denied infringing any of the patents and underscored key differences in the technology Nokia uses.
Nokia said it welcomed the verdict in a statement to The Texas Lawbook.
“Nokia respects the intellectual property rights of others and will take action to vigorously defend ourselves against unfounded accusations,” the prepared statement reads.
Jeff Eichmann, founder of Santa Monica, California-based Eichmann and lawyer for Correct Transmission, said his team was “grateful” the jury rejected Nokia’s invalidity defense.
“The patents in this case were a decade ahead of their time and have become very important to the router market,” Eichmann wrote in a prepared statement to The Lawbook. “We firmly believe that Nokia has made extensive use of the patents and profited greatly from that use. But it seems we were unable to meet our burden at trial of clearly showing the jury that Nokia infringes these complicated patents.”
Correct Transmission pointed to past communication sent to Nokia and to the tech giant’s purchasing of more than $4 million worth of its products in an attempt to persuade the jury Nokia knew of its patented technology and infringed on it.
The patents originated with Corrigent, an Israeli company created in 2000 by Izhak Tamir. Tamir, who traveled to Marshall from Israel to testify, said Corrigent sold products to Nokia Siemens Networks in 2009. Nokia wound up purchasing about $4.4 million worth of products from Corrigent, Tamir said.
As the industry took a downturn, Corrigent’s revenue declined, and 180 of its patents were sold in a 2015 liquidation sale to Orckit.
Orckit sent a letter to Nokia in 2017 to gauge Nokia’s interest in licensing or acquiring a patent not at issue in the trial. But along with that letter, Orckit attached its patent profile, which contained the three patents at issue in this trial, said Correct Transmission’s lawyer, Greg Dovel, a partner at Santa Monica, California-based Dovel & Luner. That letter shows Nokia knew about the patents, Dovel said.
Dovel argued that Nokia wilfully turned a blind eye to existing patents by not investigating.
“If you have information that tells you it’s highly probable that a feature on your product belongs to someone else, then the only way you can find out for sure is to investigate, to do a patent search,” Dovel said. “And if you decide, I’m not going to find out, I don’t want to know, I’m going to be blind to what’s going on, that’s willful blindness.”
Correct Transmission later acquired the patents from Orckit.
But the letter pointed to products Nokia didn’t make and it didn’t identify a product accused of infringement in the trial, Nokia lawyer John Haynes, an Atlanta-based partner at Alston & Bird, told jurors in closing arguments.
Correct Transmission’s patented technology addressed “problems that didn’t exist,” Haynes said.
“The things that they tried to improve on already worked just fine, and that’s why you saw in this evidence the things that they’re accusing in this case, Nokia was already using back in 1998,” Haynes said.
Haynes characterized Correct Transmission’s business model as acquiring patents and attempting to make money off patented technology it did not invent.
Jeremy Pitcock, a New York-based lawyer and the owner and manager of Correct Transmission, testified that his company fronts the costs for litigation and enforcement because “without companies willing to license and enforce patents, the inventors and patent owners may never receive any return” and other companies that use their intellectual property “face no consequences.” His company filed the lawsuit in 2022 after obtaining the patents.
James Travis Underwood, a partner at Marshall-based Gillam & Smith, defended Pitcock’s work in closing arguments.
“If someone is using your [intellectual] property without your permission, you can’t call the sheriff, you can’t call the local police department. The option is to file a lawsuit,” Underwood said. “But lawsuits take time and resources, and that’s what Correct Transmission and Mr. Pitcock bring to the table.”
In closing arguments, Haynes accused Correct Transmission of wanting money, “plain and simple.”
“They don’t care whether we’re using the accused functionality or not; they want money,” Haynes said. “This case is not about promoting science and it’s not about protecting their inventions, because we don’t use those inventions, plain and simple.”
The patents at issue are U.S. Patent Nos: 7,127,523; 7,283,465 and 7,768,928.
Nokia is also represented by Michael Clayton Deane, Caleb J. Bean and Nicholas Tang Tsui of Alston & Bird, Michael Charles Smith of Scheef & Stone and Deron R. Dacus of The Dacus Firm.
The case is 2:22-cv-00343.