US trade watchdog, mobe makers queue to smack Qualcomm as antitrust trilogy opens

Re: Patently ridiculous?

Sure, but then Qualcomm gets its IP into public standards, then refuses to let people use the bits that make it actually work without paying through the nose.

Re: Patently ridiculous?

The most obvious dispute is about patent validity. Mathematics is not patentable. Software is a branch of mathematics so software patents should be invalid. The US courts are slowly getting this bashed into their heads with a clew bat but only if the case reaches SCOTUS and then only the minimum possible precedent is set. In the EU you can patent software if you call it a "computer implemented invention".

As far as I know, patents are abused at every opportunity no matter what the domain. The default 20 year term has not been sane for decades. In some domains you can find an alternate solution but for phones you need compatibility for a modem to be useful.

Re: Patently ridiculous?

Does this sort of shit happen in other domains, Pharmaceuticals for instance?

Seems that being a patent troll (even if you manufactur) is big business. Large corporations are sucking up patents quite a bit of late. It's not just tech companies. Seems there's a business model that if you own patents, the license fees will make a nice profit even after legal expenses. Look up Martin Shkrell and Turing Pharmaceuticals for some drug shenanigans.

I just noticed. here's another story about patent trolls and licenses.. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/08/wilan_apple_lawsuit/

Shakespeare was right about what should be done with lawyers.

Re: Patently ridiculous?

> Does this sort of shit happen in other domains, Pharmaceuticals for instance?

Patents granted in the fields of medical equipment, pharmaceuticals etc. are routinely challenged through all possible instances. CRISPR/Cas9 is a huge battlefield. It is in the news if you care to look for it.

And that is the thing, people want or demand even the latest cool tech and the latest medical inventions to cure their ills. They do not want to pay for the work to develop these things. It was a long journey from GSM to 5G and a lot of work but many people went into this. And they would like to get paid for their work.

I used to be a researcher and found the gap between pay and expectations to be a bit much, more than was healthy for my student debt.

Well exactly. And bundle pricing is a feature used everywhere not just in this business.

What choice did the phone OEMs have? At the time, Qualcomm was the ONLY source for chips compliant with the US spec version of CDMA. Since that's not something that came from a standards organization, FRAND rules/pricing don't apply. Basically if you wanted to be able to sell phones that were usable by half the US market, you had to deal with Qualcomm. The only major OEMs who didn't have to talk to Qualcomm were Chinese players who didn't sell in the US market.

Samsung was the only major worldwide phone OEM that was able to work around that, but that's because they also hold a lot of LTE patents and couldn't be pushed around quite as easily as the others.

Who do you blame for Microsoft's monopoly abuse in the 90s, when they made PC OEMs pay for a Windows license for every PC sold, even if they didn't include Windows? Is that on Dell, who would basically have had to shutter if they couldn't get a deal with Microsoft to sell PCs running Windows? Or is it on Microsoft, who insisted on those terms?