Mannerisms

“You only get one chance at it”, said Malcolm Penn, CEO of analysts Future Horizons, “the more unreasonable you are, the more you people dig in to stop you doing it again. It’s much smarter if you don’t quite screw people into the ground and, instead, try and get as much as you can without upsetting people. But if you absolutely go for broke, and try and take as much as you can, you never get another chance.”

In return for the industry’s wide acceptance of Qualcomm’s WCDMA technology for 3G, Qualcomm gave a commitment to international standard bodies that it would license its technology on ‘fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms’.

Since then a raft of telecommunications manufacturing companies have made legal complaints that Qualcomm has ignored this condition by demanding IP charges of up to $5 per hand-set, and giving companies cheap IP deals if they buy Qualcomm’s chips.

Qualcomm spent over $200m last year, and expects to spend $200m this year, on lawyers’ bills fighting these legal battles.

The court battles have been bitter. Qualcomm’s chief lawyer, Lou Lupin, resigned, a US judge has referred the behaviour of six Qualcomm lawyers to the State Bar of California for possible sanction for ethical lapses, another US judge found that Qualcomm had committed intentional abuse of industry-standards bodies, while a US court ruled that handsets containing Qualcomm’s chips which infringed Broadcom patents should be banned from the US market.

The EC is investigating Qualcomm and, with Nokia alone, Qualcomm is involved in litigation with California, Wisconsin, Texas, the U.K., Germany, the Netherlands, France, Italy and China.

Now the world has given a resounding ‘No’ to Qualcomm’s proposal that it adopt Qualcomm’s UMB, Ultra Mobile standard for 4G.

“There are alternatives”, adds Penn, “people don’t like being held to ransom and they’ll do anything to avoid it happening to them again.”