This afternoon I broke the news on Twitter that the mediation process between Nokia and Daimler as well as various of its suppliers failed definitively:
BREAKING NEWS: Today the #antitrust mediation process between #Nokia and #Daimler as well as its suppliers has ended without an agreement. The issues were the same ones that made the first series of talks (in January) fail, see https://t.co/VT4DWvtI8T #frand #patents @vestager
— Florian Mueller (@FOSSpatents) February 14, 2020
A first round of talks had failed in January for the reasons I mentioned then. The fact that the supposedly super-secretive mediation process was pretty transparent to me--thanks to certain sources--even sparked a peripheral controversy at last week's Nokia v. Daimler trial in Munich.
A second round of talks was held this week, and went nowhere--for the very same reasons that the first round had failed. Nokia simply wouldn't consider extending an exhaustive component-level license to Daimler's suppliers, and Nokia continued to refuse to put highly relevant SEP license agreements with smartphone makers on the table.
Let's give the mediator the benefit of the doubt: he gave this another try just because he was unrealistic, not because it helped produce billable hours.
The European Commission's request that the parties engage in mediation--instead of doing the job European citizens pay them for--was a bad idea in the first place. It set a terrible precedent and made Mrs. Vestager, who earned herself a reputation as a determined competition enforcer during the first time, appear very weak.
Interestingly, the fact that last week's Munich trial went very well for Nokia didn't bring the parties closer to a deal. Maybe no one believes that the Munich court will seriously interpret a key sentence in the Court of Justice of the EU's Huawei v. ZTE ruling as if "and" meant "or." It's also possible that Nokia's piecemeal injunction strategy--with an explicit carve-out for Samsung subsidiary Harman Becker for the time being--means even a ruling in Nokia's favor on April 9 wouldn't give the failed handset maker much leverage.
Whatever the reasons may be, if the European Commission respects itself, it just can't let Nokia obtain an injunction on a highly illegal basis--refusing to license Daimler's suppliers is a clear violation of EU antitrust law. In December 2012, the Commission pressured Samsung into dropping any pending requests for SEP injunctions against Apple. If the Commission doesn't put the same pressure on Nokia with a view to the Munich ruling scheduled for April 9, it will lose much of its credibility as an antitrust watchdog.
This has been a bad week for Nokia. On Tuesday, it lost a case against Daimler in Mannheim. On Thursday, one of its privateers, Conversant, lost a case against LG in Munich (over a Nokia patent). Plus, it failed to bully Daimler and its suppliers into a deal.
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