Government-owned South Korean telecommunications research arm, the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), is suing yet more foreign vendors, including Nokia and Motorola, for alleged CDMA patent violations.
Unnamed ETRI officials told Yonhap News that the institute lodged patent violation court orders against 22 foreign vendors in 2009, including a suit filed in California in August.
The ETRI officials reportedly accuse the international vendors of violating some seven 3G technology patents, including ones for WCDMA.
The institute reportedly hopes to raise more than $270 million in royalties from the latest suits.
In June, ETRI received royalties from Taiwanese vendor HTC which it alleged violated three patents on handsets supplied to Verizon. The pair reached an out of court agreement on the issue.
ETRI, which was the first to commercialize CDMA technology in 1996, reportedly holds around 170 mobile technology patents.
“[South Korea’s] telco regulators and agencies in a broad sense have been seeking more revenues lately as the government continues to raise spending in construction and other fiscal boosting projects,” a Korean telecoms analyst told telecomasia.net.