Continental was just forced by a German anti-antisuit-injunction injunction ("AAII") to withdraw, in part, the U.S. antisuit motion it had brought in its San Jose FRAND/antitrust lawsuit against the Avanci patent pool firm and some of its contributors (especially Nokia and a couple of trolls Nokia fed with patents). As I explained in the post I just linked to, the scope of the withdrawal-in-part may give rise to an enforcement dispute. Considering that the Munich court wrote in its first AAII that German law doesn't recognize antisuit injunctions, it appears fairly likely that the appeals court will lift that AAII pretty soon.
Meanwhile the press offices of the Regional Courts of Dusseldorf, Mannheim and Munich have thankfully provided me with the numbers of the patents Nokia is asserting against Daimler in Germany and the hearing or trial dates to the extent they have been scheduled. Let's start with the the upcoming hearings and trials, in chronological order:
October 30, 2019 (morning): Munich I Regional Court, first hearing (mostly about claim construction and infringement analysis) in case no. 21 O 3891/19 over EP1388234 and the related German patent DE60240446C5 on a "hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) scheme with in-sequence deliver of packets"
October 30, 2019 (afternoon): Munich I Regional Court, first hearing (mostly about claim construction and infringement analysis) in case no. 21 O 3889/19 over EP2797239 on "a method and a telecommunication device for selecting a number of code channels and an associated spreading factor for a CDMA transmission"
December 10, 2019: Mannheim Regional Court, trial in case no. 2 O 37/19 over EP1273199 on a "method and arrangement for maintaining synchronization in association with resetting a communication connection"
January 21, 2020: Mannheim Regional Court, trial in case no. 2 O 35/19 over EP2286629 on a "method and apparatus to link modulating and coding scheme to amount of resources"
February 6, 2020: Munich I Regional Court, trial in case no. 7 O 3890/19 over EP1671505 on a "redundancy strategy selection scheme"; the first hearing was held on June 5, 2019, and the court's inclination is to hold Daimler to infringe (and to reject its FRAND defense)
March 17, 2020: Mannheim Regional Court, trial in case no. 2 O 36/19 over EP2145404 on a "method and apparatus for providing control chanels for broadcast and paging services"
May 19, 2020: Mannheim Regional Court, trial in case no. 2 O 34/19 over EP2981103 on an "allocation of preamble sequences"
German regional courts typically rule on patent infringement cases within four to eight weeks of trial. Decisions come down sooner only if a case is easily dismissed, and they take longer only under special circumstances such as when there are doubts over the validity of a patent and some guidance from the EPO (in an opposition proceeding) or the Federal Patent Court of Germany is expected in the meantime.
Three more German cases are pending with the Dusseldorf Regional Court, but no trials have been scheduled yet in any of them:
case no. 4c O 17/19 over EP2087629 on "a method of transmitting data within a telecommunications system"
case no. 4a O 26/19 over EP2087626 on "additional modulation information signaling for high speed downlink packet access"
case no. 4a O 27/19 over EP1929826 on an "apparatus, method and computer program product to request data rate increase based on ability to transmit at least one more selected data unit"
In the spring Daimler, Bury, Continental and possibly also other suppliers lodged antitrust complaints with the European Commission's Directorate-General for Competition (DG COMP) over Nokia's alleged abuse of standard-essential patents.
Another contributor to the Avanci pool, Sharp, has recently also filed a bunch of German patent infringement complaints against Daimler.
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