A spokeswoman for the Landgericht Düsseldorf (Dusseldorf Regional Court) has just informed me that a case brought by Nokia against OPPO affiliate OnePlus has been stayed pending the resolution of a parallel nullity action before the Federal Patent Court. In case no. 4c O 64/22, Nokia is asserting EP1700183 on a "method for secure operation of a computing device." It's a non-standard-essential patent.
Nokia is asserting this patent in Mannheim, too, but against OPPO itself. The Dusseldorf decision is not binding on the Mannheim Regional Court, but may have a persuasive effect (though the Dusseldorf court typically stays cases without stating the reasons for which a patent is deemed likely to be invalid).
Last week, the Dusseldorf court rejected a Nokia complaint against OPPO over a different patent, while Nokia won a third Munich case.
With all that's going on, I will soon publish an overview of what has happened to date in the earth-spanning Nokia-OPPO dispute.
In other German patent litigation news, Apple lost its first offensive case against Ericsson in Mannheim earlier this week. In that case, Apple was asserting a patent that had been granted to Tony Fadell, who oversaw the development of the iPad and was one of the co-creators of the iPhone, and went on to co-found Nest (which was acquired by Google). According to Wikipedia, "Fadell has authored more than 300 patents and was named one of Time's "100 Most Influential People in the World" in 2014."
Tomorrow, the Mannheim Regional Court will hold a preliminary injunction hearing in a DivX v. Netflix case over a patent that DivX is already enforcing against Netflix' Netherlands-based European HQ. The PI motion takes aim at Netflix Services Germany GmbH (case no. 7 O 111/22, provided by a spokeswoman for the Mannheim court). Judge Dr. Peter Tochtermann, who was presiding over the Mannheim Regional Court's 7th Civil Chamber, has left to become a full-time Unified Patent Court judge. For the time being, Judge Thomas Schmidt is filling in as Acting Presiding Judge, and will preside over the PI hearing tomorrow. I remember Judge Schmidt from the time when he was a side judge to Presiding Judge Andreas Voss ("Voß" in German), who is now serving on the Karlsruhe Higher Regional Court.
