The ongoing patent battle between Apple and Nokia escalated Friday, when Apple moved to block imports of Nokia cell phones to the U.S.
Apple made its request in a complaint filed with the International Trade Commission, an independent federal agency that examines issues including unfair trade practices involving patent, trademark, and copyright infringement.

Will Nokia devices be blocked from the U.S.?

In December, Nokia filed its own complaint with the USITC in Washington. In it, the Finnish company alleged that Apple infringes seven Nokia patents “in virtually all of its mobile phones, portable music players, and computers” and sought to ban imports of Apple’s iPhone, iPod, and MacBook products.
Responding to Apple’s latest move, Nokia spokesman Mark Durrant told Bloomberg that “Nokia will study the complaint when it is received and continue to defend itself vigorously. However this does not alter the fact that Apple has failed to agree appropriate terms for using Nokia technology and has been seeking a free ride on Nokia’s innovation since it shipped the first iPhone in 2007.”

Back in October, before the patent debate between the two companies moved to the trade commission, Nokia filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Delaware regarding 10 patents related to wireless handsets, which Nokia says Apple has refused to license. Every iPhone model since the original, introduced in 2007, infringes on those patents, Nokia has charged.
The 10 patents it accuses Apple of violating are related to making phones able to run on GSM, 3G, and Wi-Fi networks. They include patents on wireless data, speech coding, security, and encryption, according to Nokia.
Apple then filed a countersuit accusing Nokia of copying technology inside the iPhone. Apple said Nokia is violating a range of patents, from real-time signal processing methods to list scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touch-screen display.
In November, research firm Strategy Analytics reported that Apple had surpassed Nokia in quarterly mobile phone profits, bringing in $1.6 billion from the iPhone, compared with Nokia’s $1.1 billion in cell phone profits.
Nokia’s new mobile chief, Rick Simonson, acknowledged in an interview earlier this month that 2009 had been a difficult year for the company.
“Yes, we have lost ground in the smartphone space over the past 18 months, but the decline has stopped and stablized in the second and third quarters of 2009,” Simonson told the India Times.
“The new year will see [our] recovery in smartphones with the introduction of Maemo and the stabilization of the Symbian operating system, which by the way, continues to be the platform for the largest number of smartphones, globally,” Simonson added.

Back in 2006, Apple’s lack of experience with operators proved its advantage: Steve Jobs pushed far harder than anyone else would have dared and the operators proved far more flexible than expected. They showed themselves willing to hand over revenue, advertising dollars and (ultimately) customers in exchange for a little Cupertino cool.

Later even Apple had to accept handset subsidies, along with the operator control that came with them – thus we get an MMS client, and careful control of VoIP applications.

Google has experience working with operators – it’s been more than a year since T-Mobile launched the G1 – so the search giant has had plenty of time to work out what operators want from a handset, and thus what they’ll subsidise.

And Google’s business model isn’t a threat to the operators, unlike Apple’s, so in theory the Nexus One should be sure-fire winner with operators. That explains T-Mobile’s rumoured $350 subsidy on the $530 price of the Nexus One, which pushes headline price below the $199 Apple is asking for a (subsidised) iPhone 3GS.

Price is important, but marketing is even more so, and (quite remarkably) Apple managed to get the operators to pay for much of their advertising. The exclusive deals Apple signed with operators committed them to extensive advertising spends, and it’s hard to imagine that Google will have struck anything similar. But no-one knows more about advertising than Google, with Google also being ideally placed to ensure that there’s no confusion when someone is searching the internet for the latest Android handset.

Google’s phone, of course, won’t be exclusive. That wouldn’t be the Google way, just as applications can be bought through the Android Marketplace but can also be bought elsewhere. That’s very nice for geeks who care about such things, but for the majority it makes it more complicated, and today’s mobile-phone buyer cares more about simplicity than freedom.

So the Nexus One will be a moderate success, bringing in a little revenue for Google and serving as a reference platform for Android developers who will flock to get one spurred on by effective on-line advertising. But the general public will continue to buy the iPhone until Google comes up with some sort of killer feature to take away Apple’s crown.

Bloomberg is reporting that Apple is “in talks to acquire online music service Lala, according to two people familiar with the matter.”

The shoe fits. Back when Lala launched I described it as an iTunes in the cloud ? something that we believe Apple will inevitably launch. Apple is certainly building a lot of data center capacity for something. Lala is already one of two companies powering full-song streaming for Google’s new music search (the other one is MySpace Music via its iLike acquisition), and it is a part of the Facebook gift shop. Lala already has all the streaming licenses in place with the major music companies and a team which can help Apple create a killer streaming version of iTunes.

Many have been huge fans of Lala since its launch in October (you can see our extensive coverage here. The site uses an innovative ‘web song’ model that lets you buy albums for very cheap (10 cents per song) that you can then stream as many times as you’d like. That pay-to-stream model would certainly be more attractive to Apple than just an advertising-supported one. Lala’s streaming licenses might also allow iTunes to deliver a full-song sample instead of the 30-second previews currently available.

China is impervious to Apple iPhone’s charm. Apple’s local partner, China Unicom, has only sold 5,000 units since the iPhone debuted in the country last week, according to reports. What’s going on? Some observers blame the iPhone’s high price. But consultant iSuppli points fingers at a different culprit: The Chinese gray market for the iPhone.

Tiny only a few years ago, China’s gray market is now huge, it now accounts for nearly 13% of all legitimate global cell phone-sales. And total gray-market handset shipments are growing fast, expected to reach 145 million units in 2009, up 43.6% from 2008, according to a Nov. 3 iSuppli report. In contrast, worldwide unit shipments of legitimate cell phones will drop 8% this year, according to iSuppli. “Chinese gray-market handset suppliers have become so successful that they are grabbing share from major international handset [manufacturers],” says Kevin Wang, director, China Research, for iSuppli. And Apple is one of the manufacturers suffering as a result. While Apple waited to introduce the iPhone into the Chinese market, Chinese gray market vendors have filled in the gap with cheaper iPhone-like devices. So now, the locals see no need to rush out and buy the real thing.

A notice appeared on Mac OS Forge on Friday: “The ZFS project has been discontinued. The mailing list and repository will also be removed shortly.”

ZFS is Sun’s 128-bit file system, created for its Solaris operating system and distributed as an open source package. It is highly scalable, contains intrinsic data integrity and protection features, and supports hybrid pools of storage created from different types of storage media.

In June 2007, Sun’s then CEO Jonathan Schwartz said Apple had decided ZFS would become the filesystem in Mac OS X 10. It proved to be an inflated claim. After an initial denial, Apple said ZFS would be present only as an option in the Leopard version of Mac OS X, alongside its existing HFS+ file system.

However, earlier this year ZFS was not included in the Snow Leopard update of Mac OS X. At the time Apple stayed silent about the status of ZFS in its operating system development plans.

Now ZFS appears to have been given the heave-ho. Licensing and technology status issues may have been part of the Apple decision. As part of the background, NetApp is suing Sun for patent infringement by ZFS, with Sun counter-suing, and Oracle is buying Sun. The Oracle acquisition has raised doubt over the future status of ZFS, and it’s possible that it may just disappear, becoming a foot note in IT history.

Apple is looking for a file system engineer, by the way. The successful applicant will “work on state-of-the-art file system technologies for Mac OS X.”

Apple’s Mac OS Forge provides resources for selected open source projects. The website is “dedicated to supporting the developer community surrounding open source components specific to Mac OS X. Here you will find resources for working with the source code to popular Apple-original projects, as well as third party projects that are closely related to the Macintosh operating system.”

It currently includes projects such as BridgeSupport, the Darwin Calendar Server and Streaming Server, Launchd, libdispatch, which is a user space implementation of Apple’s Grand Central Dispatch technology, MacPorts, MacRuby, WebKit, XQuartz and, until recently, ZFS.