Omigosh, that would be great!! <According to Altman, Qualcomm licenses have a provision that cancels them in any jurisdiction where "patent exhaustion" is found to apply >
That would mean QUALCOMM would have to get a whole lot of new licensees. <Qualcomm's licensing page could go blank if the Supremes decide to judicially legislate what types of licensing agreements can be negotiated in arms length transactions, by sophisticated corporations.>
That would mean the new royalties could be based on GSM royalties, Broadcom poxy little obvious patent $6 royalties, Nokia's royalties for 1, 3, 5 or 10 patents = 5% for 10 patents so 500% for 1000 patents and the whole patent wall would be more than that.
Plus, QUALCOMM could charge what the market will bear, which is what the "correct" price is, not the "over a barrel" royalties which were agreed to back in the early 1990s when QUALCOMM was tiny, with no market share, no standards, little hope and big brutes dominating the industry and in Y2K when VW-40 aka W-CDMA standards were being developed and the pressure was on.
Now that the price of spectrum is obvious to everyone, we can see just how much has been left on the table by the absurdly low royalty QUALCOMM has charged on a bits per second per hertz basis, which is the correct way to price mobile cyberspace.
This is a NO DOWNSIDE situation. The worst that can happen is Nokia renews at the old rates. They could choose to go nuclear which would be a LOT of fun. QCOM could use $billions to short Nokia now and that's probably not a bad idea anyway because Samsung is rapidly gaining, Research In Motion and swarms of others, the iPhone etc etc etc are all eating Nokia's lunch so Nokia has reached their apogee of glory. If Nokia renews, they'll still lose market share and their share price will drop. If they don't renew, their share price drop will more than compensate QCOM shareholders for QCOM profit and share price losses by way of the short on Nokia.
Mqurice |
