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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Moderated Thread - please read rules before posting -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (54984)	9/3/2006 9:51:21 AM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 196959

I think the use of both F and R in FRAND is surplusage as IMO they mean essentially the same thing. Many other elaborations of the same concept simply use RAND. Here is a document [warning: perhaps dated] from W3C, the Web's standards developer, concerning its IPR policy. You will note many similarities with SETI's: w3.org In this document, the W3C group tries to define RAND specifically and as objectively as possible: w3.org e) RAND License RAND stands for "reasonable and non-discriminatory" terms. A "RAND License" shall mean a license that: 1.- shall be available to all implementers worldwide, whether or not they are W3C Members; 2.-shall extend to all Essential Claims owned or controlled by the licensor and its Affiliates (except as described in section 8.2 concerning licenses relating to Contributions); 3.- may be limited to implementations of the Recommendation, and to what is required by the Recommendation; 4.- may be conditioned on a grant of a reciprocal RAND License to all Essential Claims owned or controlled by the licensee and its Affiliates. For example, a reciprocal license may be required to be available to all, and a reciprocal license may itself be conditioned on a further reciprocal license from all (including, in the case of a license to a Contribution, the original licensee). 5.- may be conditioned on payment of reasonable, non-discriminatory royalties or fees; 6.- may not impose any further conditions or restrictions on the use of any technology, intellectual property rights, or other restrictions on behavior of the licensee, but may include reasonable, customary terms relating to operation or maintenance of the license relationship such as the following: audit (when relevant to fees), choice of law, and dispute resolution. You'll note the reciprocity condition to which you refer. And you'll also note the more explicit language used in the document, a reflection IMO of a typically American attempt to nail down the meaning of an amorphous subject. If you think that the telecomm biz has an ongoing dispute concerning the licensing of IPR, it seems that the Web folks have the equivalent of the OK Corral showdown taking place. Don't be too surprised if the open source initiative doesn't infect telecomm as well, though it seems that licensing for a fee is a lot more established in telecomms than elsewhere. I hope Q and its lawyers have this book in their respective IPR libraries: mitpress.mit.edu The ultimate problem with RAND is this: Not only is it amorphous but it is necessarily so because no written policy can possibly cover all events. If NOK, for example, cross-licenses its IPR to Q for nothing yet orders 70,000,000 chipsets from TXN, is Q justified in reducing the fee if NOK should agree as part of the deal to tout in a marketing campaign the fact that Q's terrific chips are in its handsets? Should the same rate apply to a manufacturer who buys only 2,000,000 chipsets, does not cross-license to Q, and doesn't engage in a marketing effort? Obviously, NOK should get a better deal than the other company, and yet both would still be receiving a RANDly bargain under the circumstances looked at as a whole. All this of course is manna from Heaven for IPR lawyers, but I really don't see any other way possible to deal effectively with the conundrum but to have presumptively neutral parties [the courts] examine all aspects of a specific grievance after each side has presented its best case using the best counsel they can afford.