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19 February 2016Patents

T-Mobile handed patent exhaustion victory at Federal Circuit

A US court’s ruling, which said that T-Mobile, Ericsson and Nokia did not infringe three wireless communication patents because the rights were exhausted has been upheld by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

The decision, handed down yesterday, February 19, is a blow to Luxembourg-based High Point, which sought to overturn a 2014 ruling by the US District Court for the District of New Jersey.

The dispute concerned T-Mobile’s sale of devices using 3G technology. In a lawsuit filed in 2012 patent owner High Point complained that T-Mobile had infringed the patents.

The patents in question were originally owned by AT&T, which then sold the patent rights to Avaya in 2000. High Point bought the patents from Avaya in 2008.

Licensing deals between AT&T and Ericsson and Siemens were finalised before the patents were sold. Siemens later entered into a joint venture with Nokia.

Nokia and Ericsson, which supplied T-Mobile with the allegedly infringing equipment, were also named as defendants in the lawsuit.

The district court ruled that both Nokia and Ericsson were authorised to supply the equipment due to separate licensing deals entered into with the original assignee of the patents, AT&T.

The unanimous three-judge panel on the federal circuit affirmed the district court’s judgment that High Point’s patent rights “were exhausted by the authorised sale of telecommunications infrastructure equipment substantially embodying the asserted claims [of the asserted patents]”.

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