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

To: pyslent who wrote (68171)	8/23/2007 5:51:31 PM
From: engineer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 197489

Or that that practice is any more or less "submarining" than any other practice?

To: pyslent who wrote (68171)	8/24/2007 9:00:38 AM
From: Eric L	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 197489

QUALCOMM V. Nokia and Nokia v. QUALCOMM: Implementation Patents << Nokia never asserted any patents until May and that was, of course, after the agreement expiration. ... So do you think there's any significance to the fact that Nokia waited until after the expiration of the 2001 agreement to assert their implementation patents? >> I suppose that's possible, but I don't necessarily read it that way. I think that the timing is a coincidence. QUALCOMM asserted implementation patents against Nokia for the first time in Texas and Wisconsin on April 3, a few days before the 2001 agreement expired. In the 9 previous suits in Nokia asserted no counterclaims of infringement of their GSM essential or non-essential patents. In this case QUALCOMM opened the non-essential implementation patent box and Nokia reacted in kind. "Tit-for-tat," as Nomura's Dr. Windsor stated. I also think the likelihood that Nokia gave QUALCOMM a blanket license to any, much less all of its implementation patents, is low. Make that VERY low. Essential patents cover functions that are necessary to implement a specific interoperability standard, and members of an SSO or SDO are obligated to declare those patents on a timely basis, and to license them on RAND/FRAND terms. Implementation patents are patents that cover non-requisite methods of implementation of essential and non-essential functionality, and/or functionality that a patent holder designs and implements to differentiate the functionality of his specific product from his competitor and add value to it. Members of SSO/SDOs have no obligation to declare these patents or license them, and they can (and in many instance do) have considerable commercial value. They are not, as one wag here suggested, submarine patents. They can be asserted at any time against an infringer. Nokia 'Smart Messaging' is a specific example of a proprietary implementation with commercial value. Two way SMS was defined in the GSM Phase 1 standard early on, and enhanced in GSM Phase 2 with its redefined and enhanced SMS bearer enabled over the air (OTA) provisioning and personalization. Long before the EMS or MMS standards were defined Nokia implemented a considerably enhanced proprietary extension of SMS that enabled incorporating special characters, logos and other graphics, and ringtones in SMS messages. It accelerated the adoption of SMS dramatically, and gave Nokia a significant competitive advantage that enabled them to gain significant market share, moving rapidly by Motorola into the number 1 slot and then well beyond. They built and marketed a better SMS mousetrap. Eventually they licensed the capability governed by their implementation patents to Samsung, LG, and others. Much non-essential implementation functionality is today built into the Nokia Series 6O smartphone platform that Nokia licenses to Samsung, LG, Lenovo and others, and makes available to its large Forum Nokia development community. Best, - Eric -