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Technology Stocks : The New QUALCOMM - Coming Into Buy Range -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: slacker711 who wrote (826)	8/15/2007 12:01:30 AM
From: limtex	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9132

slacks - Unfortunately, Brewster disagrees with that interpretation of their obligations.... So does does carra and in quite emphatic terms. If Q didn't declare its patents to the GSM/EDGE committee then the patents are going to be declared good but unenforceable. End of story. The only way out of that is through the appeals system which is years. Is there any good news on the horizon to help alleviate the corrosive effect of the endless litigation and gut wrenching announcements of juducial penalties and sanctions against the Q. Best, L

To: slacker711 who wrote (826)	8/15/2007 12:37:12 AM
From: genedabber	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9132

" Unfortunately, Brewster disagrees with that interpretation of their obligations...." This statement certainly implies that your righteous Judge may be biased after all! Gene

To: slacker711 who wrote (826)	8/15/2007 12:52:24 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 9132

GSM was NOT part of what QUALCOMM was doing: <they made a conscious decision not to disclose their patents to the standards committee. It is my view that they must have believed that there was no legal requirement for them to do so as long as they didn't actively participate (or they never would have had engineers at the meeting).> "Disclosure" is a load of malarkey. The GSM Guild knew what they were doing. Nokia's excuse was "we thought use of QUALCOMM patents in GSM/GPRS/EDGE was covered by our licence for W-CDMA". Contrary to what Brewster thinks, patents these days cannot be concealed. They could in his hey-day when literally tons of paper could bury patents like a needle in a haystack. Brewster knows that search can find emails. Surely he can figure out that search can likewise find patents. He is promulgating a weird dichotomy if he thinks finding stuff in cyberspace works for judicial process but not for patents. "Disclosure" when everyone knows very well what patents are involved is just ritual and when QUALCOMM wasn't involved in the development of GSM/GPRS/EDGE as they weren't, it's ridiculous to think they should be tracking and attending and "disclosing". L M Ericsson and others could read the patents any time of the day or night, on-line, but still were adamant that QUALCOMM technology was irrelevant to VW-40 [aka W-CDMA] let alone GSM/GPRS. Those QUALCOMM patents were not plops [poxy little obvious patents]. They were "breaches the laws of physics" spectacular inventions which registered experts didn't think were doable. Bill Frezza denied CDMA would work. The Stanford professor denied they'd work. The point of disclosure is not so much to discover relevant patents like one would discover Dr Livingstone, but to get commitment on how much royalty will be charged for said patents. That's the point of disclosure these days. Now that they are all on a roll, Brewster et al, Eurocrats, Chinese, Koreans and so on will just use precedent, declare QUALCOMM to be ipso facto a serial infringer and submarining ambusher monopolizer out to rort the industry and consumers around the world, breaching the laws of disclosure along with the laws of physics. A bunch of plops used to obfuscate the W-CDMA standard with bells and whistles on the CDMA engine will be treated as better than equal to anything QUALCOMM has done. The USA has shot itself in one foot. Now they'll do the other. Mqurice

To: slacker711 who wrote (826)	8/15/2007 7:33:54 AM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 9132

that they must have believed that their was no legal requirement for them to do so as long as they didnt actively participate (or they never would have had engineers at the meeting). Unfortunately, Brewster disagrees with that interpretation of their obligations.... I doubt that was the case. Not only was the obligation to disclose well known b/c it was read before the start of any meeting, the duty is made clear in the ITU's policy statements. Case law and public policy have also had an impact on the amount of IPR disclosed in the standard–setting process. The two most important cases were the FTC’s antitrust actions against Dell and Rambus, and a great deal has been written about each of them. The central message of both cases is that firms that fail to disclose their intellectual property, or worse attempt to manipulate the disclosure process, may forfeit their property rights. firstmonday.org An IPR powerhouse like Q knows these elementary principles. The only reasonable conclusion is that it decided in this case to ignore them. It seems likely that Q did not seek to establish a strategic IPR advantage after the standard was finalized because it probably realized that it had run afoul of the disclosure requirements. Seeking to assert IPR rights after the standard had been set would have meant that Q would run into a buzz saw of opposition. My guess is that it concluded that no good purpose was served by asserting them. It made an exception as regards BRCM, however. While it is clear that Q did not play the hold-up game with the industry as a whole, it obviously did attack BRCM, perhaps thinking that a victory over BRCM might lead to industry capitulation. This, if true, was a terrible lapse of judgment on Q's part. I suspect that the bitterness of the fight with BRCM has a lot to do with Q's loss of perspective.