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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dave who wrote (20307)	12/22/1998 11:13:00 PM
From: Clarksterh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

Dave - If "blocking patents" are indeed true, all of us would still be using Analog phones. A little hyperbolic perhaps? In fact it does happen on occasion, and you picked a good example (phones). Until the patents expired on Alexander Graham Bell's invention there was no competition in phones in the US. But in general the argument is not over whether it is possible to have one blocking patent, but whether it is possible to have covered the waterfront with a whole bunch of patents each of which alone might not be completely blocking, but taken together effectively are blocking. For instance, imagine that today, knowing all of the best patents and trade secrets for making transistors, we went back to 1950 and wrote up a separate patent for each (maybe 50 or 60 in total?). No one patent is really blocking, but the sum total is daunting and effectively no one but that patent holder could be making transistors. This kind of advantage accrues to anyone who has a field to themselves for long enough. Clark PS Note that this kind of advantage is rare, because normally when companies find something really valuable many other companies jump in and lock up some of the obvious alternatives. In a way Qualcomm owes a debt to Ericsson, Frezza, the Stanford professor et al for so effectively discouraging research by other companies into mobile cell system CDMA.