The Delhi High Court has ordered Oppo to deposit 23% of its India sales for using Nokia’s technology in its phones without the requisite consent. Oppo has to get the compensation done within 4 weeks.

The 23% figure was decided by the High Court Bench because Oppo’s sales in India account for around 23% of its global sales.

In 2018, Oppo secured a license from Nokia for using their technology over a 3-year agreement. Oppo also made advance payments for using this technology.

The agreement did not cover the use of patents relating to 5G standards. 5G devices account for 52% of Oppo’s sales in India. Considering this, Oppo would have had to pay a substantially higher amount to Nokia.

Nokia alleged that after the 2018 agreement expired, Oppo had an unprecedented increase in the sale of its devices and around 77 million of their devices had been sold in India without paying a single rupee as royalty.

Nokia’s case is that they offered to discuss the renewal of the agreement but, Oppo refused to negotiate. Nokia then filed a lawsuit in the Delhi High Court for infringement of its patent for 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G devices in India.

Nokia sought a temporary deposit from Oppo of an amount based on the latest counteroffer made by Oppo for a global license during the negotiations or an amount equivalent to the royalty paid under the 2018 agreement.

A single judge of the High Court dismissed the application seeking interim deposit, stating that the court did not have the power to do so without going into the merits of the case. Nokia then appealed against the order before a 2 judge bench.

In this case, Oppo’s argument is that a patent holder cannot seek an interim or even a permanent injunction as a matter of right and Nokia was seeking interim security in the initial stages of the case, without substantiating any of its claims.

The court set aside the single judge’s order and directed Oppo to deposit 23% of the proceeds of their India sales.

The post Oppo Has Been Directed To Deposit 23% Of Its India Sales As Compensation After Nokia’s Lawsuit appeared first on The Tech Outlook.

The Fedora Project is an independent project developed in coordination with Fedora Linux, announced that it will not permit Creative Commons ‘No Rights Reserved’ or CCo-licensed code in its Linux distro or the Fedora Registry.

The company said that they have taken this decision against Creative Commons’ CCo-licensed open source software as it could pose a threat to maintaining cybersecurity.

According to Senior Commercial Counsel Richard Fontana at Red Hat, “CC0 has been listed by Fedora as a ‘good’ license for code and content (corresponding to allowed and allowed-content under the new system). We plan to classify CC0 as allowed content only, so that CC0 would no longer be allowed for code…This is a fairly unusual change and may have an impact on a nontrivial number of Fedora packages (that is not clear to me right now), and we may grant a carveout for existing packages that include CC0-covered code.”

Creative Commons is an American non-profit international network developed for educators to expand the range of creative works. Educators or content creators can build up or share content without copyrights to their content, it has no bearing on the patent or trademark rights that the creators continue to retain. Officials of the Fedora Project underlined CC’s trademark issue as the actual problem by saying, “No trademark or patent rights held by Affirmer are waived, abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this document.”

The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC)’s policy fellow Bradley M. Kuhn said in a statement, “Patents (that apply) to software are a constant threat to the rights of users and redistributors of FOSS — particularly those that deploy FOSS commercially. That’s why SFC opposes the patenting of software entirely.” As corporations including patents to consumables and distribution of free open source software can become problematic in the future.

Experts suggest that software developers should aim toward creating a transparent license like GPL or copyleft-next as opposed to CCo where patent rights are not waived. Other experts like an artist and hacker Rhea Myers explains how big tech companies like IBM and Red Hat which support supports subsidiary of Fedora will refrain from having to face any copyrights or patent issue in the future. In that case, Fedora supporting CCo can become a huge problem for these corporations.

Yes CC0 does what it is meant to for cultural works but software from any sizeable organization is a patent minefield. Fedora is a large-scale collaborative software development project, so their/IBM’s lawyers don’t want to step into that minefield. 🙂

— Rhea Myers (@rheaplex) July 26, 2022

The post Fedora giving up on Creative Common’ ‘No Rights Reserved’ software due to patent issue appeared first on The Tech Outlook.