Mannerisms

"Producing 1.2 million pages of marginally relevant documents, while hiding 46,000 critically important ones, does not constitute good faith," said Judge Barbara Major.

Qualcomm has become one of those exceptionally litigious US companies, like Rambus, which tries to get its IP adopted by the industry, and then tries to gouge extraordinary levels of royalties and licensing fees from those who use it.

It is said that Qualcomm’s royalty charges can amount to 5 per cent of the cost of a mobile handset, and that Qualcomm gives discounts on license fees and royalties to companies which use its chips, despite having undertaken to license its technology on ‘fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms’.

The undertaking was given in return for the mobile industry standardising on Qualcomm’s CDMA technology.

Whereas standardisation is a good thing in that it can produce an environment for a competitive industry, it is a very bad thing if it allows one company to gain dominance over a market, as Wintel did over the PC market and as Rambus tried to assert over the DRAM industry.

Unfortunately, US chip companies, enthused by the financial success of Wintel, and often egged on by over-active investors, have taken the view that standardisation is something to be aggressively exploited to maximise profit.

Clearly the lessons for Europe and Asia are: create your own standards as China has done with TD-SCDMA, avoid standardising around US-owned IP, and avoid dealing with predatory companies like Rambus and Qualcomm wherever you can.

In this latest legal case, Judge Barbara Major stated that the issue revolved around whether Qualcomm had disclosed the patents at issue to a standards committee. The judge said Qualcomm had withheld the documents in an attempt to win the case.

Judge major’s findings on Qualcomm uncannily echo the allegations made against Rambus: that it went to standards-setting meetings, did not disclose its patent position at those meetings, even used knowledge gained at those meetings to apply for patents on technologies likely to be adopted as standards, and then, when the technologies became standardised, sought to claim unusually high levels of royalties on those patents.