There may be a time when it’s worth going over all the legal actions between Qualcomm and Broadcom, but this latest news is not enough to trigger that. Qualcomm has won its second successive court room battle against Broadcom, on this occasion getting the US District Court for the Southern District of California to agree that its patents are not exhausted.
Perhaps this was tactical inelegance in that Broadcom was admonished by the judge for not naming any specific patents that it thought were exhausted, and failed to show any direct harm to itself from the patents.
This case was a sideshow. What Broadcom aims to do it create a level playing field at the chip level in technologies which Qualcomm at least partially, and in some cases centrally, invented.
What it wants is a clear patent pricing regime that it can manipulate to get it into CDMA and W-CDMA chip manufacture. It’s not too surprising that Qualcomm wants the opposite. So many of these legal actions are side alleys, where they chance their arm and see if a judge will leave the door open a little. Qualcomm tries to push a patent agenda that allows it to get money for a broad license of its patents in one deal, which legislates against companies that want some small part of Qualcomm’s patent hoard.
The jurisprudence issues are should you have to pay a license for ALL of Qualcomm’s patents in order to use one, and if you are a chip maker should your customers have to pay all over again, once more, for ALL of the patents.
All of these disputes relate back to Broadcom winning some chip contracts with Qualcomm’s Korean partners, Samsung and LG, and Qualcomm suing on spurious grounds in order to block this, saying that Broadcom had infringed on some aspects of video codec patents. Broadcom called its bluff and won that dispute and then won its own, alleging that Qualcomm used its power saving patents. It has gone on and on since then, with a work around claimed, a contempt of court action brought, and various European and Korean anti-trust Courts also being brought into it.
Nokia, one of the other legal opponents to Qualcomm on some of these patent issues, joined in the actions, but last Autumn reached a settlement with Qualcomm and is now working with it on advanced LTE chip development.
It seems almost impossible that a courtroom could fairly resolve all disputes between the two, and that a truce which Broadcom and Qualcomm tried to call a few years ago (except for cases already in play) will eventually be revisited, but not until both are ready to come to the table. Meanwhile only lawyers are getting rich.
In this particular case the court said that Broadcom had failed to identify any specific patents that were exhausted or unenforceable. Qualcomm also said that the “court also ruled that Broadcom’s purported injuries were too speculative to support the claims alleged.”
Broadcom argued to the court that Qualcomm was spreading fear among customers over who it was safe to buy wireless chips from, because of fear of litigation from Qualcomm.