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Technology Stocks : Interdigital Communication(IDCC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bux who wrote (3875)	2/11/2000 10:42:00 PM
From: Gus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5195

While it's good to see you being less dogmatic about IDC, I don't know why you insist on trying to turn the 1994 cross-licensing agreement between QCOM and IDC into a sale? QCOM paid IDC $5.5 million and to date, IDC has paid nothing to QCOM. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Of course, IDC or its potential sublicensees (Samsung, Alcatel, Siemens) had no use for QCOM's patents because their broadband approach clearly involved more spectrum than QCOM's narrowband CDMA. I am more than a little surprised that IDC investors do not seem very concerned with the pioneering CDMA patent rights that were sold to only one company, even going so far as allowing them to sub-license to others Your persistency in this matters borders on the inexplicable, Bux. What is so difficult about this language from the SEC filings: .......ITC granted to Qualcomm a fully-paid, worldwide license to use and sublicense certain specified and then existing (but excluding defined after-filed and/or granted) ITC CDMA patents (including related divisional and continuation patents) to make and sell products for IS-95-type wireless applications, including, but not limited to, cellular, PCS, wireless local loop and satellite applications..... Message 12840786 Or this from QCOM's own filing: Ericsson, Motorola and InterDigital have each advised the TIA that they hold patent rights in technology embodied in IS-95. Lucent and OKI Electric have claimed patent rights in IS-96. In accordance with TIA guidelines, each company has confirmed to the TIA that it is willing to grant licenses under its rights on reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms....... Do either excerpt say anything about a sale of patents? Do you see anything that indicates a license with perpetuity? What about the limitation on bandwidth applicability to 10Mhz? Not only is there no room for any fancy and creative interpretation that somehow gives QCOM perpetual rights to patents that eventually expire, but given the rate of advancement in technology, IDC and QCOM have both gone on from the state of their contrasting approach to CDMA in 1994 to develop more advanced innovations covered by patents on top of their early patent work. That's the reality of a long line of prior art with shared spread spectrum foundations. Like Jacobs and Viterbi, Schilling and Lomp also did a lot of work for the defense industry before they ventured into the commercial arena. Do you question the fact that Schilling was already working on broadband CDMA even before Qualcomm was incorporated? QCOM deserves credit for getting 10% of the market - more than half in South Korea, which as you know was facilitated by a government mandate - with its 2g narrowband CDMA where it is the primary technology provider, but IDC is beginning to get credit for the fact that not only does it have fixed and mobile broadband CDMA applicable to 3g, but it also has core TDMA patents that will continue to be useful for a long time. but IDC has the 3G keys in the bag Let me make it simple for you. It's a free world. QCOM is perfectly within its rights to stick to its hard-line patent-one-patent-all flat royalty rate and IDC, given the size of the potential market, is free to cut more symbiotic deals with manufacturers involving royalties and chipsets under the 3g Patent Platform which includes guidelines on mix-and-match, suggested royalty rates and maximum cap on royalties while still providing for a framework for licensor and licensees to cut their own deals such as the deal between Nokia and IDC which allows IDC to retain ownership of technology developed during the term of the deal. Given these facts, it's understandable why QCOM has to sell very aggressively the notion that it has the keys to 3g in CDMA2000 and WCDMA when the easily verifiable fact of the matter is that global frequencies are still being aligned and the details of the non-QCOM standards that form part of the 3g family of standards are being finalized at the ITU --next meeting: March 7 to March 10. That's the most critical assumption of all the anaylsis I have seen: QCOM's ability to impose its royalty regime. The amount of easily verifiable material I have posted on this board regarding the history of IDC's patents in TDMA and CDMA supports the view that IDC has TDMA patents and CDMA patents *TOTALLY I-N-D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-T* of QCOM's narrowband version and thus a viable alternative to CDMA 2000. What do you think that is worth to company with working second generation system-on-a chip technology and which only has 53 million shares (some preferred conversions in the last quarter)? Lastly, QCOM and IDC have never been mutually exclusive investments given the sheer size of the market.