Microsoft is heading to court in its battle over royalties as it accuses Samsung of using its Android patent in its device software without paying the licensing fee.
The tech company accuses the Korean manufacturer of wanting to end its royalty payments after Microsoft acquired Nokia. A judge is to decide whether the royalties should continue.
Samsung has been paying per-device royalties for every Android device it sells to Microsoft since 2011, a cross-licensing agreement. It is not the first such agreement, as Microsoft has a number of other agreements with Android OEMs.
According to Microsoft, Samsung last year decided to stop paying the royalties on time and was not making the late-fee payment when it did, prompting Microsoft to take action.
"After spending months trying to resolve our disagreement, Samsung has made clear in a series of letters and discussions that we have a fundamental disagreement as to the meaning of our contract," wrote David Howard, Microsoft corporate vice president, in a blog post Saturday, Aug. 2.
Microsoft is arguing that because of Samsung's move to the top of the smartphone market, Samsung no longer believes it needs to pay the royalties.
"Samsung predicted it would be successful, but no one imagined their Android smartphone sales would increase this much," wrote Howard.
Samsung has been reported to have said it stopped the payments after Microsoft's acquisition of Nokia.
"Curiously, Samsung did not ask the court to decide whether the Nokia acquisition invalidated its contract with Microsoft, likely because it knew its position was meritless," Howard said.
The move comes as Microsoft aims to clean house after its Nokia purchase, with the company to lay off thousands of redundant workers. Tech Times has also reported that the Nokia brand may soon be a thing of history as Microsoft has apparently decided not to move forward with a Nokia top-shelf smartphone.
Rumors hint that the Nokia McLaren device may not being created and rolled out, with the company reportedly killing off the device's development.
The decision, according to the reports, was made weeks ago to discontinue development of the Nokia McLaren, even though there had been optimism for the new phone before Nokia was acquired by Microsoft, who incorporated much of its workforce with its own.
