Back in September Qualcomm’s MediaFLO issued a release saying that MediaFLO patents would be licensed to Newport Media royalty free, and at the Mobile TV World Congress last week Qualcomm steered us to the press release when we asked FLOForum president Dr Kamil Grajski about licensing.
He advised us to read it carefully, so we looked it up again. One quote seemed to make its policy abundantly clear. It is free.
‘In order to encourage multiple FLO chip vendors, Qualcomm is enabling companies, such as Newport Media, to develop and market FLO chips incorporating Qualcomm’s patented technologies without payment of royalties to Qualcomm,’ said Marv Blecker, president of Qualcomm Technology Licensing.
But reading it carefully the statement went on ‘Subject to Qualcomm’s standard terms and conditions, Qualcomm will license its essential FLO patents for use in multi-mode CDMA/FLO handsets with no increase to its standard royalty rate for CDMA-based handsets.’
So there you have it. FLO is only royalty free if you already pay a standard Qualcomm license for its CDMA technologies, which Qualcomm made clear included WCDMA, but not GSM. Which means that it remains both unspecified and therefore not free, when a supplier that does not have a royalty agreement wants to sign up just for FLO.
So despite that fact that Nokia would not want to make MediaFLO devices, it would be in breach of Qualcomm licensing terms if it tried to without resolving its licensing issues with Qualcomm across the board. Which is quite funny really, when you consider that much of the technology inside MediaFLO is identical to the DVB-H standard ‘ the OFDM, the error correction, the time interleaving, the frequency interleaving ‘ which begs the question, who has more patents in MediaFLO, Nokia or Qualcomm ‘ our guess is that it’s not Qualcomm and could conceivably be Nokia.
Perhaps Nokia and others should discuss licensing terms with Qualcomm, before Qualcomm goes giving away the technology to companies like Newport Media. This situation is very like the one where Microsoft licenses the VC1 codec to other companies and uses the technology itself bundled in Windows Media Player. Microsoft even boasted that it could license VC1 cheaper than H.264. When Microsoft finally went to MPEG LA to form a patent pool for the technology so that it could be a recognized standard, it turned out that 11 other companies felt they owned essential patents, and that they’d like a say in the licensing equation, since it was being used to undermine H.264. So where MediaFLO is being licensed for free to rivals of both Nokia and DVB-H, it will almost certainly lead to more litigation somewhere down the road.
Which is why it is not surprising that Qualcomm raised its provision for legal fees in the its latest accounts from $100 million to $200 million. It still might not be enough.