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Technology Stocks : WDC/Sandisk Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ausdauer who wrote (8032)	11/8/1999 10:24:00 PM
From: John Stichnoth	Respond to of 60323

Aus--How would that impact the proceedings I mentioned earlier? That is exactly the issue I am addressing in my Post 8033. From a non-lawyer perspective, I believe that there are general standards for licensing patents. If for instance Lexar has provided a license for its patent to another firm, it is implicit that that license must be issued to Sandisk at similar rates. Similarly, Sandisk's licenses to Toshiba, for instance, will provide general guidance on the rate it would have to license to Lexar. These guidelines are very broad, however. For instance, Qualcomm is able to license recent licensee fees much higher than earlier licensees (and thus can stick it to Ericsson while Samsung's got a good deal); that's because they wrote the contracts at different times, and CDMA was in different position in the market. By the way, the ratio would be much better than 4 to 1 in Sandisk's favor, I believe. Of both firms' patents, a number might be excluded by the licensee as irrelevant. And Lexar (and Sandisk, for that matter) seem to have a fair number of patents that aren't real interesting to others. Using citations as a guide to value, the ratio might be something like 14 to 1 (158 to 12). This announcement by Lexar is pure fud, imo. Best, JS