***IDC and their excellent lawyers*** IDC is a great company and all my previous disclaimers, caveats and habeas corpus fordham.edu apply heretofore, hereinafter and wheretohence.
Qualcomm, in the interests of getting on with CDMA, agreed to pay IDC an extorquerationate amount of moolah, not for use of their patented technology, but to get them off Qualcomm's back so that CDMA would not have a cloud hanging over it right at the beginning of commercialization. Prospective customers might have been put off from buying the technology until the brilliant IDC lawyers were satisfied.
Irwin Jacobs quite rightly paid them their fees and went on his way to quickly create the new world standard. Qualcomm could not afford the risk that an OJ Judge would get puzzled between the erlangs, orthogonality and wave functions in Poisson Distribution of patent rights. Some judges and juries are not really up on this stuff, though they are no doubt brilliant harmonizers of laws and 'fairness'.
But now, CDMA is very, very well established as the core of The New Paradigm. No longer will companies genuflect to Interdigital's legal embellishments of their excellent patents, of which there are hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands and millions, some of which probably go back to before Ericsson invented CDMA in 1890.
In a nutshell, I'd say Interdigital has had its day in mobile CDMA. BUT I hasten to add, that is a forward looking statement for which all safe harbour and due diligence statements, exclusions and caveats apply and your own and others own care and attention to their own individually derived opinions should be developed as it might be WRONG. Interdigital has such brilliant lawyers that it could very well, beyond a reasonable doubt, be wrong.
There were press releases at the time, with Qualcomm specifically stating that they could not afford to be held up at the early stage of CDMA commercialization. Qualcomm did not agree that they had to buy patented technology from Interdigital and the matter was NOT tested in court. It was settled absent a judge's or jury's decision.
So, in another nutshell, everyone has to buy Qualcomm's patented technology to make 3G work and that is all they have to buy. Qualcomm can supply it all. The cdma2000 clone with racing stripes, VW40, [sometimes known as W-CDMA], is another kettle of hagfish altogether and the patent claims and costs for that will make the Koreans blanch if they thought Qualcomm's 5.5% was high and would stop CDMA development [they were as wrong there as it's possible to be].
Hope this helps.
Mqurice |
