Microsoft Backed Rockstar Consortium And Huawei Reach Patent Settlement On Android Patents

Rockstar Consortium, a patent holding company jointly owned by Apple, BlackBerry, Ericsson, Microsoft and Sony was formed when Nortel’s patents were open for bidding. Rockstar won the bidding and it is now in the process of striking licensing deals with other companies to give back the money to its founders. Last year, Rockstar Consortium and its MobileStar Technologies subsidiary sued Google, Huawei and other Android OEMs for violating its patents. Google even submitted their response to court regarding this patent case. Today, FOSS Patents reported that Huawei has settled with Rockstar Consortium and decided to drop the patent case in the court.

While the motion to dismiss does not explicitly state that the parties have settled, it would be utterly unrealistic to believe that Rockstar would let Huawei use those patents without a royalty-bearing license. Whatever the basis of this settlement may be, a “freebie” it’s certainly not.

This is already the second time over the last couple of months that Huawei has become the first defendant to settle litigation targeting multiple companies. Huawei also reached an agreement recently with standard-essential patent (SEP) troll InterDigital to resolve the dispute through arbitration of the royalty fee. It’s possible that the settlement with Rockstar also involves arbitration of license fees, but the parties may already have agreed on financial terms.

Other OEMs including Google are expected to pay up Rockstar for Nortel’s billions worth wireless patents.

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Source: FOSS Patents