In an amended SEC filing ahead of its IPO, Reddit warned potential investors that "...on March 18, 2024, Nokia Technologies sent us a letter indicating they believed that Reddit infringes certain of their patents. We will evaluate their claims." Nokia, of course, leaned into, ahem, patent licensing and networking equipment as its business many years ago, and reminded people of it with last year’s logo redesign. Companies paying Nokia licensing fees include HTC, Apple, and more recently, Oppo.
Nokia is a husk of a former tech company that was gutted by Microsoft for anti competitive reasons and now used as a patent troll arm of Microsoft.
https://slidebean.com/story/microsoft-nokia-acquisition
That’s not even close to the full story, and partly straight up incorrect.
They sold their mobile branch. The brand of which eventually ended up with HMD global, which now makes Nokia branded phones.
Nokia Oyj is a telecom RnD and infrastructure company, as in the hardware and standards behind wireless communication tech. They never stopped.
They essentially pulled an IBM and exited the consumer market, but they never ceased operation, or sold off their main business.
Microsoft has had absolutely nothing to do with Nokia Oyj since buying their consumer handset branch off them.
And even back when Microsoft bought the mobile phone operations the company making the phones was Microsoft Mobile and Microsoft only leased the brand name from Nokia to use on their mobile phones for 10 years - same as with HMD Global today.
That is entirely incorrect. Microsoft doesn’t own the company and never did. MS bought the phone division and a license for the name to go with it.
I tried to look up what this notice is actually about, but there’s nothing out there yet. So can’t say much being a patent troll “arm” either.
And reddit is a husk of a former tech company who doesn’t even have a good excutfor why they’ve gotten consistently worse over the last decade.
That’s sad.
And inaccurate. MS never bought Nokia in its entirety, the parts it did acquire languished for a while, with the brand eventually ending up with HMD Global. That is the company that makes Nokia phones today, and they’re doing ok.
The company that’s relevant in this patent dispute is Nokia Oyj, the main operations of which is telecom RnD and infrastructure, and it has nothing to do with MS aside from being the company that they bought a mobile phone division from.