Gregg - I agree that our disagreement is largely one of emphasis, but I would pose the question for the sake of argument - why would Ericsson 'compromise' in such a way that they know that the people holding them out of 3g contention will not accept it? They know, essentially for certain, that Qualcomm will not accept the new chip rate. Thus this buys them nothing with the ITU since Qualcomm's letter to the ITU will still be in place, and the ITU isn't going to care what Ericsson does as long as that letter from Qualcomm remains in place (and somewhat obviously the 'compromise' has no bearing on the technical validity of the IPR being claimed by Qualcomm.).
If they didn't make the move for ITU reasons, they must have been forced to this move for other reasons, and I suspect technical ones. You say that they must have known about the chip rate problem for a while, but it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't. This is, after all, just about the most basic issue in communications - out-of-band power and linearity issues - and yet they proposed it in the original spec. If they were stupid enough to propose it in the original, it is quite conceivable that they have only just conceded to themselves that it isn't doable. As an engineer I've seen this kind of thing happen frequently - the engineers on a project say that the spec is completely unrealistic, but management doesn't concede until they start to look foolish (as Ericsson was with the independent papers being published).
I don't expect us to reach agreement on this, but I thought y'all might be interested in my reasoning.
Clark
PS I might agree with you more that this was a sign of Ericsson's legal weakness if they really did concede on something, no matter how minor. But this 'compromise' is that in name only and Ericsson undoubtedly knows it.
PPS FYI I don't think I ever said, even by accident, that the IPR issue was a minor one (I checked my posts to be sure). The only claim I made is that Ericsson and Qualcomm have equal IPR power in the ITU 'court', but not in the real courts. |
