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Technology Stocks : The New Qualcomm - a S&P500 company -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: POB who wrote (4692)	12/30/1999 6:08:00 PM
From: Art Bechhoefer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13582

Regarding IDC, if I recall correctly, QUALCOMM and IDC settled a patent dispute that arose over the issue of whether the predecessor company to QUALCOMM, called Linkabit (which was sold to M/A/COM and that company subsequently acquired by IDC), owned certain CDMA patents. QCOM said no, those patents were assigned to the original developers, now heading QCOM. In the settlement, each company cross licensed the patents to the other, but IDC was restricted in its use of those patents to broadband applications. IDC then went around trying to market its patent properties, leasing them out like an apartment house owner leases units. One of the takers was Siemens, as I understand it, and this connection led to the development of the WCDMA standard, which would allow 3rd generation users of GSM to circumvent other CDMA patents. QUALCOMM has always stated that there are patents in WCDMA that require payment of royalties to QCOM. If IDC and its sympathetic investors are banking on CDMA, my guess is that those patents are limited in scope, and they're getting older. If those are the Linkabit patents, some of them could be nearly 15 years old, which certainly limits their intrinsic value. I don't know what IDC has in the way of TDMA patents, but so what? That's a fading technology, compared to CDMA. The main point is that IDC operates like a patent landlord, not creating new patents but simply trying as best as possible to raise the rent on the existing ones. QUALCOMM operates as a patent developer, creating new intrinsic value daily. The notion that IDC is a "baby" QUALCOMM is just plain weird when you consider the lack of creativity of the one and the genius of the other.