Nokia sues Apple in US and Germany for infringing patents

Image: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic

By tech2 News Staff /  22 Dec 2016 , 08:54

Nokia has announced that it has registered several complaints in the US and Germany against Apple. Nokia is alleging that Apple is infringing on a number of patents owned by Nokia. Nokia has three valuable patent portfolios that are commonly used in various consumer electronics such as tablets, mobile phones and personalCOMPUTERS.

Nokia has invested EUR 115 billion (roughly Rs 8 lakh crore) in research and development over a course of twenty years in the industry, with tens of thousands of patents to its name. Nokia also owns the patents of Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN). Nokia acquired Alcatel-Lucent in mid 2016 and bought out NSN in 2016.

“Through our sustained investment in research and development, Nokia has created or contributed to many of the fundamental technologies used in today’s mobile devices, including Apple products. After several years of negotiations trying to reach agreement to cover Apple’s use of these patents, we are now taking action to defend our rights,” said Ilkka Rahnasto, head of Patent Business at Nokia.

This is not the first time that Nokia has sued Apple. In fact, Nokia alleging patent infringement by Apple was the first salvo fired in the smartphone patent wars, in 2009. Apple countersued, and Nokia sued Apple over infringements of additional patents in 2009 itself. In 2011, Apple and Nokia agreed on a settlement. Nokia claims Apple has declined to license several other patents it uses since the 2011 agreement.

Smartphone patent wars as visualised by George Kokkinidis at Design Language.

Nokia has registered the complaints in Regional Courts in Dusseldorf, Mannheim and Munich in Germany and the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas in the US. Nokia alleges infringement of 32 patents covering the display, user interface, software, the antenna, chipsets and video encoding. Nokia has said that it is in the process of filling complaints in other jurisdictions as well.

WhatsApp temporarily pauses user data sharing with Facebook in Europe

Representational image: Reuters

  16 Nov 2016 , 10:31

WhatsApp has temporarily suspended giving parent company Facebook information about users in Europe for ad targeting, responding to concerns there over privacy, a source close to the matter said Tuesday. Conversations with officials in Europe over the past few months resulted in the social network deciding to only tapping into WhatsApp user data there for purposes such as fighting spam, according to the source.

The break was described as an effort to give regulators time to share privacy concerns and for Facebook to consider ways to address them. German data protection authorities in September cited privacy concerns when they blocked Facebook from collecting subscriber data from WhatsApp there.

“It has to be (the users’) decision whether they want to connect their account with Facebook,” Hamburg’s Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information Johannes Caspar said at the time. “Facebook has to ask for their permission in advance.”

WhatsApp announced in August that it would begin sharing data with Facebook, in a bid to allow better targeted advertising and to combat spam on the platform. Users of the instant messenger were given the ability to opt out of sending information to Facebook through settings in WhatsApp’s applications on smartphones.

European data protection group G29 formally expressed its concerns at the end of October. The G29 sent letters asking Facebook and WhatsApp to stop sharing data until appropriate legal safeguards were in place. The sharing of WhatsApp user information with Facebook went beyond what subscribers consented to in the original terms of service, the G29 reasoned.

Facebook bought WhatsApp about two years ago in a deal valued about $19 billion. In mid-September, the European Commission recommended tighter privacy and security requirements for services including WhatsApp and Microsoft-owned video calling service Skype, saying they should be regulated more like traditional telecoms.

Under the proposal, the commission would require companies like WhatsApp or Skype to offer emergency-calling services when customers dial traditional phone numbers as well as obey stricter privacy rules.

AFP

German Chancellor Angela Merkel asks Google and Facebook to release privately-developed algorithms

  27 Oct 2016 , 16:08

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has accused technology giants Facebook and Google of “narrowing perspective” and demanded that they make public their privately-developed algorithms, media reported. Merkel, who had previously blamed the social media for anti-immigrant sentiment, said: “The algorithms must be made public, so that one can inform oneself as an interested citizen on questions like, ‘what influences my behaviour on the internet and that of others?’.”

“These algorithms, when they are not transparent, can lead to a distortion of our perception, they narrow our breadth of information,” RT.com quoted Merkel as saying in Berlin this week. Google and Facebook use algorithms to decide which search results are shown first and the order of the news feed respectively. The companies decide to include posts from a user’s liked pages and friends and also promote links to news articles, often based on a user’s own media interests.

According to the report, these algorithms comprise some of the most highly protected trade secrets in the world, potentially worth billions. No internet giant has ever revealed its inner workings. “The big internet platforms, via their algorithms, have become an eye of a needle which diverse media must pass through to reach users. This is a development that we need to pay careful attention to,” Merkel noted.

IANS

Germany will invest $5.6 billion in digital infrastructure over next five years

Image Credit: REUTERS

  13 Oct 2016 , 15:18

Germany plans to invest an extra 5 billion euros ($5.6 billion) over the next five years to equip more than 40,000 schools and colleges with faster internet, wireless access points and tablet computers, the Education Minister said on Wednesday. The investment plan, which still needs to be agreed by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet, is another sign that Germany is more willing to meet international calls to spend its record budget surplus on infrastructure and education.

“We have to make a big leap forward to improve digital education”, Johanna Wanka said, adding that the government would make the money available for the 16 federal states that are traditionally in charge of education in Germany. German schoolchildren have only scored mediocre results in international education studies in the past years, although some evaluations show that they are slowly catching up.

A survey on digital education in Germany has found that less than 2 percent of pupils have daily access to a school computer. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have for years urged Germany to step up public and private investment to boost domestic demand and reduce its massive current account surplus.

Close allies such as France and the United States have also called for Germans to open their wallets, and the government has reacted by increasing its spending on infrastructure and accommodating and integrating a record influx of refugees.

Critics say Germany could do much more like taking advantage of record-low borrowing costs to take on new debt and ditching the balanced budget policy championed by Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble.

In another potential boost for domestic demand, the cabinet agreed on Wednesday on Schaeuble’s proposal to cut income taxes by 6.3 billion euros in 2017 and 2018. The plan, which was already announced by Schaeuble and Merkel last week, aims to correct “cold progression” or bracket creep in the tax system.

Thresholds in Germany’s progressive tax system are not automatically adjusted for inflation. This means that workers who get a pay rise can find themselves ending up with a net pay cut.

Reuters

IBM pours $200 million investment into its Watson IoT business

By Teena Maddox  | October 3, 2016, 3:01 PM PST

The IBM investment will be used in part to develop hands-on industry labs at Watson's IoT headquarters in Munich, Germany.

IBM is investing $200 million into its Watson IoT business, which is headquartered in Munich, Germany. The Watson IoT headquarters will be home to new hands-on industry labs where clients and partners will work with IBM's researchers, engineers, and developers to drive innovation in the automotive, electronics, manufacturing, healthcare, and insurance industries.

This is one of IBM's largest ever investments in Europe, and is in response to customers wanting to use a combination of IoT and Artificial Intelligence technologies. IBM currently has 6,000 global clients, up from 4,000 eight months ago, according to an IBM press release. These clients are using Watson IoT technologies to gather information from billions of sensors embedded in machines, cars, drones, ball bearings, and hospitals.

"IBM is making tremendous strides to ensure that businesses around the

Facebook Prohibited From Collecting WhatsApp Data In Germany

The Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information has issued an administrative order that prohibits Facebook from collecting data from German WhatsApp users. Facebook was also ordered to delete any of the data that it may have already collected on German WhatsApp users.

The order comes after WhatsApp recently announced that it will automatically begin to share data with Facebook. Users were given the option to manually opt out of the data collection, but for a period of only a month. After that, they would no longer be able to opt out. 

In the U.S., privacy groups such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) also filed a complaint with the FTC asking the agency to require Facebook to make the data collection an opt-in choice for users, rather than an opt-out one.

According to the Hamburg Commissioner, WhatsApp and Facebook used to be separate entities with their own privacy policies, and when Facebook acquired WhatsApp, it promised no data would be shared between the two. However, the two companies have now gone back on their promises by announcing they will begin to share data with each other, even when users opt out.

The commissioner said that this means the two companies were misleading users, and it’s also an infringement on Germany’s national Data Protection law. He also believes that Facebook should have required permission from every user in advance before collecting WhatsApp data. Data Protection laws in the European Union require that when data is collected, the user must give his or her explicit permission (opt-in) rather than implicit permission (opt-out).

"This administrative order protects the data of about 35 million WhatsApp users in Germany," said the Commissioner.

"It has to be their decision, whether they want to connect their account with Facebook. Therefore, Facebook has to ask for their permission in advance. This has not happened," he added.

The order also accuses Facebook and WhatsApp of collecting contact details of users even if they didn’t have Facebook or WhatsApp accounts.

"According to Facebook, this gigantic amount of data has not yet been collected. Facebook's answer, that this has merely not been done for the time being, is cause for concern that the gravity of the data protection breach will have much a more severe impact," said the Hamburg Commissioner.