| | | Royalties and licensing fees are a form of taxation, designed to promote innovation by giving inventors a temporary monopoly on their new methods of getting things done. You assert that "nobody likes to pay taxes," but taxes in the case of royalties are simply another cost of doing business. If you want to do business with another person's invention, you usually have to pay for it, unless you're as big as Apple. Then you can choose – spend enough to make your own work around or pay to play. Because patents are a limited time monopoly, and accepted as that throughout most of the world, the resulting fees are expected. Given the typical royalty rates charged by others in the industry are at least as high, it is difficult to argue that Qualcomm's rates are confiscatory or even unreasonable.
Some people insist that Apple is a monopolist, in the sense that Apple can apparently charge higher prices for its products and still get away with it. But really what Apple is, and what Apple so aptly demonstrates in its various lawsuits, is a monopsonist, playing suppliers against one another in order to get better prices for the components and related material, including software, that it uses in its devices.
The Apple argument that it should pay only a modest royalty on components or designs that use QCOM intellectual property, is a classic monopsonist position, based on its huge buying power. As the various lawsuits involving QCOM and AAPL reach trial stage, the Apple strategy and accompanying arguments will become clearer to the courts, and juries if need be.
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