The W-CDMA Patent Licensing Programme
Art,
<< Though the Justice Dept. and others may have approved of this group approach to licensing and royalties ... >>
They did.
<< ... that doesn't necessarily mean that all participants are REQUIRED to be in the group, especially when one member still owns most of the essential patents ... >>
In 3GPP UMTS no one member owns most of the patents and in fact the several most significant holders of essential IP have not ...
... but you are correct, no essential IP holder is required to join the W-CDMA Patent Licensing Program.
<< To make such an agreement mandatory would be tantamount to price fixing, and would be per se anticompetitive. >>
Yes. Going one step further, without approvals of the Justice Department, the EC, Japans FTC, etc., if the majority of major IP holders paricipated in such a program it could legitimately be called a cartel.
Ignoring the background of the action initiated by Nokia and subsequently joined by Ericsson, NTT DoCoMo, and backed by Fujitsu, Matsushita, Mitsubishi, NEC, Sony, et al, to cap royalties based on a determineation of the proportion of essential patents a company holds with a cumulative royalty rate for WCDMA to be at a "modest single-digit level"
devxnews.com
A creative Atomic Bob InterDigital message poster ('eneerg') recently refered to what was in the process of being aproved by DOJ, the EC, and Japan's FTC, as a price fixing cartel. See Rich Bloem's clip of that post here ...
Message 23382428
<< The issue you have discussed makes clear the whole motive behind a large part of the litigation: QUALCOMM, being the largest source of intellectual property for CDMA, CDMA2000, and especially WCDMA and its variants ... >>
QUALCOMM is without question the the largest source of intellectual property for CDMA (including IS-2000 and IS-856 which collectively are known as the CDMA2000 family).
QUALCOMM might like to have gullible investors believe that it is the largest source of intellectual property for WCDMA and its extensions, but it is not, and that fact (or at least purported fact) is at the heart of the complaints being evaluated by the EC Directorate General for Competition today.
<< ... at the moment, the reality is that QCOM has the strongest position in this technology. >>
If that is the foundation of your faith, perhaps it would be wise to repeat that 10 times in your oblations each evening.
The only reality is that today QUALCOMM is the dominant collector of WCDMA royalties and they are being accused of abusing that self-proclaimed dominant IPR position in the EC, Japan, and Korea.
Best,
- Eric - |
