Just As We Warned: A Chinese Tech Giant Goes On The Patent Attack -- In East Texas
Techdirt has been warning for years that the West's repeated demands for China to "respect" patents could backfire badly. In 2010, Mike pointed out that Chinese companies were starting to amass huge patent portfolios, which were soon used as weapons against foreign firms operating in China, most notably Apple. In another 2010 post, Mike wrote the following:
Huawei, the Chinese networking giant, has taken over the lead as filing the most international patents of any company. Just wait until American companies, whose execs complained about China "not respecting intellectual property," start getting sued in East Texas for violating Huawei's patents.
And guess what? That is exactly what has just happened, as The Wall Street Journal reports:
Huawei Technologies Co. said it has filed a lawsuit against T-Mobile US Inc., alleging the U.S. telecommunications carrier violated the Chinese company’s patents related to wireless networks.
There is an uncanny closeness between those two stories, even though six years separate them. In part, of course, that's because of Mike's ability to spot trends well ahead of others (no, he didn't tell me to write that...) But it's also down to the fact that this trend was really obvious to anyone who was able to consider the situation dispassionately. Sadly, that seems to exclude most of the people demanding that fast-growing economies around the world should start to "respect" patents.
In its complaint filed this week in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Huawei said T-Mobile is using its patented technology without signing a licensing agreement.
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