Qualcomm finally seems to have won a courtroom battle with Broadcom as an appeals court has said that those CDMA handsets which the ITC (International Trade Commission) said last year could not be imported, can after all come on in.
The issue seems to be that the handset makers were not named in the suit so that the ITC did not have the right to include them. The Court noted that Broadcom knew the identities of all of Qualcomm’s customers, but chose not to name them in the action, perhaps because it wanted to single out its rival Qualcomm and not make itself unpopular with what should end up as major customers for Broadcom. Qualcomm itself, which has the chips made outside the country, cannot actually import them, although it claims that it now has new chips, with a software workaround installed and that it is perfectly entitled to import these. At some stage either the ITC or a court is going to have to decide if that’s true.
These were the chips that were deemed to use technology that infringed the power saving patents of Broadcom, for which Qualcomm never had a license. The court has now asked the ITC to go back to the case, so perhaps it will now be able to clarify if the workaround is valid or come up with another way to resolve the case.
Phone makers Motorola, Samsung and LG Electronics had all appealed the ITC ruling. Although this now puts Broadcom on the back foot, it is unlikely that either of these two players are ready for an out and out settlement, because they have already tried that.