Okay look at it this way: I spent 40B euros digging a well to get water in my extremely parched village. I would prefer to be able to make some of that back by charging others to draw water from my well. What is wrong with that???

This is not like Nokia went and patented something that was already existing in the market and is trolling. They poured their own money into it, so why would they let a competitor, esp. a very succesful competitor use their tech for free???

What tech would that be ?

The patents listed all contain stuff that seems to be pretty obvious when it comes to mobile communications.

Yes, you need encryption, thousands of manyears of work not done at Nokia preceded that. Yes, you will need GSM, which is unfortunately patent encumbered, but since there is no other option that makes any patents on that tech a simple matter of extortion.

WiFi ? How else will you connect to a lan from a mobile phone ?

Etc. If this is Nokias best shot at showing how they're going to 'compete' with Apple then they've just told us they don't think they can. What a total waste of a reputation.

It reminds me of the GIF patent.

I believe it is something to do with the core "GSM technologies and its evolution to UMTS / 3G WCDMA", an area where Nokia has indeed done a lot of original research.

That would be a chipset issue, apple does not make it's own G3/UMTS chipset, although there are some rumours that they have some custom mods.

Your analogy is flawed. It would be more like:

I spent 40B euros figuring out how to and and digging a well to get water to my parched village. I add a bucket, but the water is still kind of muddy. I'm the only well, though, so I do well enough.

Then someone comes along and digs a well a couple hundred feet away, adds a pumping system (so they can sell more water) and a filtration system (so the water is cleaner). Nobody wants my water anymore. So I'm about to go broke.

So of course, instead of making a better pumping and filtration system, I sue the guy making the better well. At least, that's Nokia's position.

In the above post, the well represents the patented technology. He creates the technology (digs the well) and patents it (seeks to profit from it by monopolizing it's use).

In your analogy, you seem to be skipping the issue of patents entirely. Note that Apple did not go out and "dig it's own well" by developing something completely unrelated to GSM, UTMS, Wi-Fi, etc. Whether Nokia's claim turns out to be valid aside, it's undeniable that Apple is using the technology that Nokia is making the claim on. That is to say, they aren't suing over Apple developing "the better well", they're suing Apple for using their well without compensation.

> developing something completely unrelated to GSM, UTMS, Wi-Fi, etc.

The point is that they could not have because that would be inoperable.

Interoperability with GSM-based networks is not a God-given right.