Apparently originally Nokia has asserted 9 patents, including "reduction of power consumption in a mobile station" (U.S. Patent No. 5,570,369), which it has dropped in Oct 2012, "method for making a data transmission connection from a computer to a mobile communication network for transmission of analog and/or digital signals" (U.S. Patent No. 5,884,190), and many more. Prior to this streamlining, 2 patents have been dropped. Some of these streamlining is directly requested by ITC, for otherwise it'd be hard to keep the schedule running given the vast number of complaints it has to deal with every day. According to a blogpost at Foss Patent, "four patents is a pretty common number of patents to be asserted at ITC trials if the original complaint involved nine or ten patents. Larger sets of patents are quite uncommon at that stage."
The 3 patents dropped this time include a light guide patent (U.S. Patent No. 7,106,293), and two closely-related database synchronization patents (U.S. Patent No. 6,141,664 and U.S. Patent No. 7,209,911).
So why did Nokia pick these 3?
Judge Pender had construed disputed terms over these 3 patents and Nokia has lost the claim construction battle on them. As suggested by Florian Mueller, "pursuing any claims over these patents seemed pretty pointless after the claim construction order".
I think narrowing the scope of the litigation will allow Nokia to focus more on the patents they are more certain to successfully defend in court. Moreover, decreasing the amount of claims they say are being infringed will save them more time, effort, and resources.
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