A German judge has ruled that Nokia should be granted an injunction against all HTC handsets running Android. Judge Dr. Matthias Zigann of the Munich I Regional Court found the devices to be in violation of a broad patent related to a method for transferring resource information across Bluetooth or NFC according to a report from FOSS Patents.
HTC is in between a rock and a hard place in Germany following the ruling. In the event the company can’t come up with a chance to appeal, Nokia could then enforce the injunction which would put a stop to all sales of HTC devices running Android.
And to make matters worse, this isn’t a temporary injunction like we’ve seen so many times before. If Nokia is eventually successful, they would be able to keep the offending devices off store shelves indefinitely.
A victory here could have far reaching ramifications for other handset makers as well. That’s because the broad patent essentially describes a method used by handset makers to transfer data between devices. True, there’s still Wi-Fi as an option but near-field communication and Bluetooth are both commonly used among Android devices.
This is the second favorable ruling for Nokia against HTC this month. Previously, Nokia won a case that would have required HTC to remove devices from store shelves but HTC made a change that circumvented the infringement. It’ll be interesting to see whether or not HTC can make similar changes this time around to once again thwart Nokia’s injunction.
