Microsoft taken to court over Lumia 950 smartphones
Microsoft may have shut down its smartphone business, but that isn’t stopping others from taking the company to court over the technology.
On Tuesday, November 7, patent licensing firm Lemaire Illumination Technologies accused Microsoft of patent infringement through the production of the Lumia 950 smartphone.
In a filing at the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division, Lemaire claimed that Microsoft had infringed patents covering pulsed light-emitting diode (LED) illumination and apparatuses and methods.
The patents mentioned are US numbers 6,095,661, called “Method and apparatus for an LED flashlight”; 6,488,390, titled “Colour-adjusted camera light and method”; and 9,119,266, called “Pulsed LED illumination apparatus and method”.
Microsoft unveiled the Lumia 950 smartphone device in October 2015.
“When the camera of the Lumia 950 smartphone device is activated to capture an image, the electrical control circuit selectively provides a set of pulses from the battery to the triple LED flash, which generates a light output of the one or more LEDs,” said the claim.
According to Lemaire, the pulses change to control a “colour spectrum of the light output of the one or more LEDs of the triple LED flash and adjusts an LED on-time, thereby controlling the light output as the DC voltage source charge varies”.
The suit claimed that Microsoft had infringed in a “wilful, wanton, malicious, bad-faith, deliberate, consciously wrongful or flagrant manner, which is an egregious case of culpable behaviour”.
Lemaire is seeking a jury trial, general and special damages, triple damages, and injunctive relief.
In May 2016, Microsoft announced that it was cutting 1,850 jobs in the smartphone business, as well as putting aside $950 million to cover the costs of exiting it.
Microsoft had acquired Nokia as part of a €5.44 billion (worth $7.16 billion at the time) buyout of the Finnish company’s mobile phone division in 2013.
It acquired Nokia’s devices and services business for €3.79 billion (which was worth $4.98 billion), paid €1.65 billion (worth $2.17 billion at the time) to license all of its utility patents over ten years, and acquired the Lumia brand.
But in May 2016, Microsoft sold the Nokia brand to Finnish company HDM global.
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