EU warns Nokia against becoming a patent troll

European competition commissioner Joaquin Almunia warned Nokia of the inadmissibility of becoming a patent troll. Such a threat arose after the Finnish company sold most of its business to Microsoft. The most valuable of the remaining Nokia assets are patents.

Joaquin Almunia gave permission for the deal between Nokia and Microsoft to sell the mobile business in the amount of 5.44 billion euros. He said that the purchase "does not pose a threat to Microsoft", but in the new environment, Nokia may try to "extract higher profits" from its patent portfolio. “In other words, it can act like a patent troll or, to put it mildly, like a patent protection organization,” said Joaquin Almunia.

Nokia has a lot of patents in the field of mobile communications. Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft received a 10-year license to use them. The threat is that Nokia can now refuse to honestly license patents to other mobile phone manufacturers, and instead will blackmail them, using patents as a competitive advantage.
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If this happens, the European Commission initiates an antitrust case against Nokia, warned the European Commissioner for Competition. He promised that from this point on he would carefully watch the Finnish company.

Some mobile phone manufacturers in recent years have used their patents to put pressure on competitors, including Samsung and Motorola, so Nokia has examples to follow. The company has already entered a dubious path, having achieved a ban on sales in the UK of HTC One Mini smartphones, since HTC violates Nokia patents . Now the Taiwanese company must pay Nokia compensation.

At the moment, Nokia earns about 500 million euros per year on license fees. After completion of the transaction with Microsoft, this amount will increase to 1.65 billion euros per year.