Mobile phone giant Nokia said it has filed claims involving 45 of its patents in the United States and Germany. The patent lawsuits take aim at products by  HTC, ViewSonic and BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion.
“Though we’d prefer to avoid litigation, Nokia had to file these actions to end the unauthorized use of our proprietary innovations and technologies, which have not been widely licensed,” said Louise Pentland, chief legal officer at Nokia in a statement.
According to Finland-based Nokia, the three companies are using its intellectual property to enable hardware capabilities such as dual-function antennas, power management and multimode radios. In addition, Nokia asserts that its technology is used to augment software such as application stores, multitasking, navigation, conversational message display, dynamic menus, data encryption and retrieval of e-mail attachments on a mobile device.
“Many of these inventions are fundamental to Nokia products,” Pentland said. “We’d rather that other companies respect our intellectual property and compete using their own innovations, but as these actions show, we will not tolerate the unauthorized use of our inventions.”
The actions come amid financial troubles for Nokia, whose debt was recently downgraded to “junk” status by Fitch Ratings service. Nokia is also itself target of an ongoing patent dispute with mobile phone maker IPCom, which at one point threatened sales of its products in Germany.
Nokia is far from alone in the war over intellectual property. In the recent years, technology companies have launched a slew of suits against each other worldwide. In one particularly wide-ranging case, electronics mega-companies Samsung and Apple are currently involved in 50 lawsuits against each other spanning 10 countries.
