The French company Inside Secure owns quite a few number of patents relating to near field communication technology. About half a year ago, they signed a deal with France Brevets to handle the licensing of roughly 70 of those patents. What exactly does France Brevets do? They threaten other companies with lawsuits if they don’t agree to pay a small fee to use said patents. And that’s exactly what just happened today. France Brevets has sued LG and HTC over two NFC patents.
The first patent, filed back in 2001, has to do with “antenna signal amplitude modulation method.” The second patent, from 2005, deals with an “inductive coupling reader comprising means for extracting a power supply voltage.” You probably have no idea what either of these patents mean, and that’s OK, because neither do I. The only people who do are lawyers who get paid more than we can dream.
So how much money does France Brevets want? They don’t say. About the only thing that’s made clear is that there are going to be cases in two different countries, the USA and Germany. Worst case scenario? LG and HTC get a bunch of their phones banned from Europe’s biggest country and the world’s largest economy. What’s actually going to happen? Money will change hands, a press release will be put out, and this will all be forgotten.
