>>this is a misguided effort and will self-destruct due to it's unfair treatment of those who have done the most to further the technology<<
You're kidding, right?
I don't think he's kidding. Here is QCOM's position on pooling patents (from the Feb 17th conference call). W-CDMA won't happen without QCOM and QCOM won't be pooling their patents.
Many industry groups and companies have actually come to us and asked us to join -- I actually received a number of questions about this yesterday -- what they call a "patent pool". And the concept there was, "Hey, let's take everybody's patents, through them into a pool, agree to charge a maximum royalty, and then we'll share that in some predetermined fashion." And of course, everybody that doesn't have essential patents wants to join that pool so that they can gain access to the companies with the strong patent positions. We've had no interest in joining that patent pool and we'll continue with our existing bilateral license negotiations.
Also from the same conference call...
There's been, I guess recently, some questions about our position on the 3G CDMA standard, specifically what's referred to as DS, previously known as W-CDMA. We have informed the standards bodies that we have more than 100 patents that are essential to W-CDMA. And, what is meant by "essential" is that based on how these specifications are written, one cannot design a product that complies with that standard without necessarily infringing our patents, which means that companies will necessarily have to sign license agreements in order to deploy products based on that standard.
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