Ron, there are many reasons for attending a standards, or any, meeting, as you say < Of course, that says nothing about their role or their technical judgment relative to Qualcomm IPR. >
Mere attendance confirms that one was there, but doesn't infer what one was doing there and what can be concluded from attendance.
For example, I attended various standards meetings in the oil industry. My purpose was to destroy the standard, not to agree to it, nor to provide BP Oil intellectual property or advice on how to destroy BP Oil's business.
There was a re-refined standard being arranged when I got the job of Technical Services Manager in Wellington. I went along to the meeting and there were various discussions and information. I got up to speed and at the next meeting [I don't think it was the first one, but maybe it was - this was in 1983 so it's longggg ago] they were going through various specifications, dotting i's and crossing t's. Graham Wilson of Shell left the meeting for a while. When he came back an hour later, he assumed that things would pretty well be wrapped up and the standard ready to go.
Meanwhile, I had found that I could actually withdraw BP's support for a standard, which had ever only been implicit. The outcome was that the standard was ditched forthwith. And that was the end of that.
In BP Oil International 5 years later, the European Commission was wanting a single standard for diesel fuel in Europe. Bureaucrats just love single government-run monopolistic standards with everyone marching in unison and obeying the great and wondrous people who love to boss them around. I attended a meeting in Brussels and there were a couple of odd things, first, it was an environmental group meeting and they nearly all smoked - they couldn't even organize their own environment, let alone that for everyone else. The other thing was that of about 15 people, 2 didn't wear glasses [me and one other] during the meetings.
I left BP not all that long after and I don't know what happened to the standard, but I was there to kill it because a truck running from Spain to Turkey and back again in summer [or winter], needs different fuel from a little car in Stockholm, running from a person's home to downtown, and back again, in winter, even if they are both diesel engines. They need different fuel for environmental reasons, as well as the needs of the engine, and the owner's economic purposes. I was not attending as a supporter and my mere presence did not imply I was giving away BP's intellectual property.
Similarly, in 1986 the plan was for a single 95 octane European-wide petrol [aka gasoline], called "Eurograde". I got that canned, [not as a standard, but as the only fuel], and 98 octane is now widely available, though BP was dopey and didn't get the jump on everyone else. In NZ, BP actively dragged their heels on introducing 91 unleaded [another hobby horse I had] although it would increase their profits. Some people had high performance Ferraris, Mercedes, BMWs, roaring up and down autobahns at 230 kph in summer. They are wealthy and their requirements are different from Granny in chilly London who has a little car which can perfectly happily toddle around the village at low speed, and she wants her fuel cheap. 91 octane is fine for her. The wealthy racers in the heat need 98 octane [at least] to have their car run properly.
So, BP was present at meetings. But that didn't mean they were complicit in the standard, or participating in the standard-setting, or agreeing to provide intellectual property to make the standard work. What matters is the detail in the attendance/participation.
Way back in 1996 it was obvious that the GSM Guild was rampaging in cyberspace, out to steal QCOM intellectual property. SI is full of discussions about it. There for the record. QCOM was not attending meetings, blissfully supporting standards which would destroy their business, agreeing implicitly to provide their intellectual property at no charge. Even if BP was participating in the discussions and submissions, that doesn't imply that they were gung ho on board and agreeing to all that was going on. We'd need the details of agreements but it is obvious that BP had no intention of making standalone GPRS a success and would not have enabled GSM for the sake of agreeing to W-CDMA being developed. Same for EDGE which is currently killing UMTS, which is struggling in Europe.
It's simply absurd to think that QCOM was participating with a view to making GSM, GPRS and EDGE work. When it was a matter of multimode, QCOM would perhaps permit their technology to be used to make GSM/GPRS/EDGE work at the usual FRANDly QCOM IPR rate, which each licensee had signed up to, or would have to. Nokia seems to want to cast a cloak of intellectual property agreement over everything. That's absurd. QCOM's interest was obviously NOT to make GSM/GPRS/EDGE succeed, but to enable W-CDMA to succeed and be backward compatible to legacy GSM/GPRS/EDGE networks.
I'd be surprised if QCOM blundered by attendance and help on integration of GPRS etc and inadvertently gave away the keys to the magical realm of CDMA for marauding bandits to enter freely and help themselves to an Aladdin's treasure trove. It is obvious and the GSM Guild knew it, that QCOM was not participating as a gung-ho GSM provider. There would be very few managers in Nokia who didn't know about QCOM's antipathy to GSM. Nokia apparently has a history of trying to get away with intellectual property. The courts will see that this is more of the same.
Some management, even at the Kenny-Boy levels, and lots of them it seems [maybe such attitudes are part of getting to very high levels in companies - and I expect government], have an attitude of "Grab anything you can maybe get away with, and then some"; a Hobbesian world view of winners and losers, conquest and confiscation, red in tooth and claw, honesty only for purposes of deceit. Not for them a happy realm of peer to peer mutual admiration society exchange of value, synergistic mutual self-interest and harmonious uplifting of all in intellectual pursuit of perfection.
Mqurice |
