It's not enough to "declare" that one has patents. One also has to say what the licensing terms will be. What if one hasn't got a clue whether one will even license them or what the terms requested will be and the standard being considered is not even part of the company's business? Maybe "to be advised" is okay on the declaration form as used back in 2002.
It's very clear that QUALCOMM was so little involved in the standard that it was only by accident that some "participation" was discovered and that in a minor way. It seems to have been maintaining a watching brief for the most part, with attendance if convenient and the attendance was probably for other more interesting standards with an attendance at the relevant standard discussions to keep an eye on proceedings.
The "disclosure" standards were always deliberately grey and ambiguous and they have only been tightened in the last couple of years. Before that, they were a mile wide. The issue is from 2001 and early 2002 when the silly "disclosure" requirements were far more loose.
If QUALCOMM had been attending, in earnest, the Broadcom people wouldn't have needed careful search terms. They would have been well aware of attendance. Minutes would show QUALCOMM people there. QUALCOMM would have been making proposals, commenting etc.
Judge Brewster seems to be making a mountain out of a molehill. He's in a snit because Louis Lupin allegedly, based on hearsay evidence reported in a newspaper, which is sometimes not admissible in a court, said that the case was a sensible one to bring because there was no downside. I said at the time that that wasn't a good enough reason to waste court time and legal fees. But it isn't a hanging offence.
Standards bodies are not religious meetings where only true-believers go and the High Priest runs proceedings with infallibility and apostates are stoned to death. They are stupid lowest common denominator jamborees where those who can't go it alone, and those who want to form cartels go to get more money. Look at the ridiculous W-CDMA effort, which costs 12% royalties for example, with no advantage over the CDMA2000 4% royalty technology.
QUALCOMM lawyers have agreed that testimony didn't match facts found elsewhere. From what I read, it wasn't much of a gap. Maybe they were panicking and brow-beaten, caught in the hazardous situation of defiance, or begging for mercy. When captured by the powerful, begging for mercy rather than defiant denial is normal human behaviour.
Given Judge Rudi's ideas, it looks as though QUALCOMM won't be able to assert patents in the W-CDMA standard either as they probably didn't formalize a bunch of dotted i's and crossed t's, even though it was raved about since the mid 1990s right here in SI and the experts knew that QUALCOMM had a swarm of patents required for W-CDMA creation.
No doubt the tightened standard of today will be applied retroactively to QUALCOMM at the end of the 20th century when L M Ericsson and other slime-ball guild members could lie with impunity that they invented CDMA and there was no need for QUALCOMM in W-CDMA aka VW-40.
So QUALCOMM will no doubt be banned from selling ASICs in Europe too and no patents will be enforceable.
China doesn't even bother with such niceties and simply declares TD-SCDMA to be their invention in total.
Mqurice |
