LG Electronics agreed to license Nokia Technologies smartphone patents, Nokia said in a Tuesday announcement. LG is the latest of more than 60 licensees for Nokia's 2G, 3G and 4G mobile communication technology patents and the first major smartphone manufacturer to join the licensing program since Nokia divested its Devices & Services business to Microsoft in 2014, Nokia said. LG’s “detailed royalty payment obligations” under the license agreement “will be subject to commercial arbitration, expected to conclude within a 1-2 year timeframe,” Nokia said. Other terms weren’t disclosed. LG didn’t comment.

Personalized Media Communications completed a patent licensing agreement with Arris. The details of the agreement have been deemed confidential by both parties, said PMC in a Monday news release. PMC said it holds 87 patents and expects to see the issuance of 12 more within a year.

CEA President Gary Shapiro hailed the Senate Judiciary Committee's approval Thursday of the Protecting American Talent and Entrepreneurship (Patent) Act, which would close legal loopholes used by so-called patent trolls who “don't invent or manufacture anything useful, but rather abuse our patent system and extort American innovators.” The bipartisan legislation, introduced in April (see 1504290028) by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and ranking member Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., along with committee members John Cornyn, R-Texas; Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.; Mike Lee, R-Utah; Orrin Hatch, R-Utah; and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., would “make necessary and commonsense reforms to restore the integrity of the U.S. patent system,” said a committee media advisory. "Patent trolls bleed $1.5 billion a week from the U.S. economy,” said Shapiro, saying the amount has reached $120 billion since the House passed a patent reform bill in December 2013. The Patent Act will “stop this legalized extortion of American innovators and free our small businesses from the burden of bogus lawsuits,” Shapiro said in a statement. "We now ask Senate leadership to recognize the critical need to protect our small businesses and entrepreneurs, and move forward with the Patent Act as quickly as possible,” he said.

Apple landed a U.S. patent Tuesday for a “fusion keyboard” featuring “individually depressible mechanical keys having a touch sensitive area located on their surface,” Patent and Trademark Office records for patent number 9,041,652 show. “One or more of the depressible mechanical keys can be multi-purpose keys capable of being depressed to multiple levels,” says the patent, which was applied for in September 2011 listing John Elias, of Townsend, Delaware, and Steven Martisauskas, of San Francisco, as the inventors. Under the invention, the touch-sensitive mechanical keyboard “can receive key depression input, touch event input, or combinations thereof at the same time,” the patent says. The keyboard can “further include a processor for distinguishing detected touch events from detected key depressions,” it says. “The processor can generate a key depression command or a touch event command in response to the detected touch events and key depressions.” Apple representatives didn’t comment.

Disney signed a multiyear patent license deal with Kudelski Group, a Kudelski news release said Tuesday. It said terms are confidential, and the pact gives Disney a license to Kudelski’s patent portfolio, "subject to certain limitations." Kudelski "continues to invest heavily in developing technology and intellectual property that help enable industry leaders like" Disney "to deliver their popular, world-class video and entertainment platforms to the market through streaming video properties, such as ESPN.com and ABC.com,” said Kudelski Senior Vice President-Intellectual Property and Innovation Joe Chernesky.

Biometric authentication company NXT-ID filed provisional patent 62/143028 for a method and system to perform wireless payments via near field communications in a mobile device, it said Monday. The patent covers miniature antenna modules for uses including radio frequency and magnetic stripe communications, energy transfer and charging, and wireless magnetic payments, the company said. The miniature antenna modules are small enough to fit in mobile and wearable devices, including smart watches, but powerful enough to transmit wirelessly to magnetic stripe readers, David Tunnell, NXT-ID chief technology officer, said. Users can position the antenna-equipped devices within a few inches of most magnetic strip readers to transmit magnetic stripe data wirelessly, “at a fraction of the power consumption of other approaches,” Tunnell said. A key challenge with dynamic magnetic stripe technology has been to get it to work across all magnetic stripe readers, not just some, and NXT-ID’s multipurpose antenna technology has overcome that limitation, Tunnel said.

An independent license administration company, HEVC Advance, wants to start a one-stop-shop patent pool for the HEVC platform, the company said in a Thursday announcement. The HEVC Advance patent pool "will address marketplace demand for an additional licensing option of HEVC essential patents," the company said. It expects to attract a "critical mass" of HEVC patent holders, with more than 500 "essential patents" to be available for license at launch, and the number of patents expected to grow significantly soon thereafter, it said. It named Dolby Labs, General Electric, Mitsubishi, Philips and Technicolor as likely to be on "the initial list of licensors." Royalty rates and licensing terms will be made available in Q2 in preparation for a formal launch in Q3, it said. The announcement would appear to put HEVC Advance in competition with MPEG LA, which runs an HEVC license program as a one-stop shop for about two dozen companies and universities that hold HEVC-related patents, including Apple, Fujitsu, Hitachi Maxell, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Samsung and Siemens. Last week, MPEG LA said it updated coverage of its HEVC patent portfolio to reflect recent ITU revisions in the HEVC standard (see 1503190037).

Three telecom giants from China and the U.S. led international patent filing activity via the World Intellectual Property Organization in 2014, the group said in a year-end review released Thursday. China and the U.S. combined caused 87 percent of the total growth in filings under WIPO’s Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), which saw some 215,000 applications in 2014, a 4.5 percent increase over the previous year, WIPO said. China’s Huawei, with 3,442 published PCT applications, was 2014’s most prolific applicant, followed by U.S.-based Qualcomm (2,409 published applications) and China’s ZTE (2,179 published applications). The U.S. was the most active country of origin for PCT filers in 2014, with 61,492 applications, a 7.1 increase from 2013, WIPO said. Japan followed with 42,459 applications, a 3 percent decline from 2013, it said. Applicants from China filed 25,539 applications, an 18.7 percent increase from 2013, putting China in third place in terms of PCT application activity, it said.

Microsoft signed a broad patent cross-licensing agreement with Fuji Xerox, a provider of document managing systems, wrote Microsoft Executive Director-Technology Licensing Nick Psyhogeos in a blog post Thursday. The agreement “builds on our 2007 cross-licensing agreement, and offers expanded patent coverage to both companies,” Psyhogeos said. Microsoft announced a similar agreement with Melco Holdings Monday. “While patents, by definition, involve a right to exclude, Microsoft thinks about it differently,” Psyhogeos said. Microsoft’s licensing program has a goal of inclusion, he said, saying the company has signed more than 1,000 licensing agreements in the past 10 years. “Licensing of technologies contributes to the discovery and development of new synergies between innovative companies,” Psyhogeos said.

MPEG LA updated coverage of its High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) patent portfolio to reflect recent ITU revisions in the HEVC standard, the licensing group said in a Thursday announcement. License coverage now includes five variations of HEVC’s “main profile,” plus roughly 20 versions of “format range extension profiles,” it said. “The current royalty rates that apply to products which use one or more HEVC profiles remain unchanged.” MPEG LA runs the HEVC license program as a one-stop shop for about two dozen companies and universities that hold HEVC-related patents. Prominent companies on the list include Apple, Fujitsu, Hitachi Maxell, NEC, NTTDoCoMo, Samsung and Siemens.