Apple claims Motorola misusing Qualcomm license

2/10/2012 10:13 PM EST

Interesting argument put forward by Apple. Needs to be seen if the court upholds Apple's argument. What are the consequences if the Apple looses this litigation ?

2/11/2012 7:26 AM EST

The fight is getting interesting. If Moto & Qualcomm has some cross licensing agreement then no way Moto can assert them against Apple, who is a qualcomm customer. Reminds me of Synopsys Magma litigation which was cross licensed with IBM.

2/11/2012 5:22 PM EST

how do the MPEG-LA (the organization that oversees the H.264 video codec on behalf of patent holders) deal with cases such as this ?

don't they contractually mandate that ALL commercial vendors above a set minimum limit (with the option to waive royalty fees below this set minimum at their discretion) separately licence IP directly from the patten pool or an officially licensed reseller?

if its the same type of set-up arrangement as an IP patent pool, then the question cold be, did/does Qualcomm hold a valid 3rd party reseller licence from Moto or merely a licence to use the IP in their commercial products, i don't know!

2/12/2012 11:09 AM EST

Mergers and cross-licensing agreements are not new so why is this case special from a legal point of view? Kris

2/12/2012 8:16 PM EST

hmm it seems like apples new game is patent trolling taking over from Rambus Incorporated perhaps.
"Apple launches new legal attack on Samsung phones" Sun Feb 12, 2012 11:37pm GMT
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/02/12/uk-apple-samsung-idUKTRE81B0ZA20120212

"In a suit filed last week in San Jose, Apple said the Galaxy Nexus infringes on patents underlying features customers expect from its products. Those include the ability to unlock phones by sliding an image and to search for information by voice."

now i know for a fact, search for information by voice, is very old tech as i was using "IN3 Voice Command for Windows" to start search and speak input for it back in the day...http://svr-www.eng.cam.ac.uk/comp.speech/Section6/Recognition/incube.win.html

2/12/2012 11:15 PM EST

How can a licensee sue another licensee for patent infringement? Shouldn't it come under the purview of the patent holder?

2/13/2012 11:26 AM EST

@Neo1- This seems to me to be a very unusual suit. I'll be interested to see what the courts have to say about Apple's claim, should it come to that.

2/13/2012 12:33 PM EST

It appears that the practice of IP law gets more convoluted every week.

2/13/2012 4:42 PM EST

Apple would need to improve its technical depth if it wants to sue oldtimers like Moto

2/13/2012 5:06 PM EST

Apple has no technical depth??? Kris

2/13/2012 7:54 PM EST

Apple has industrial design depth but has not fundamental breakthrough technology they invented. They just pick ideas and make them cool!

2/14/2012 1:15 PM EST

Is it just me or has the world gone IP lawsuit happy? It seems every time I turn around there is another battle in courts being reported. Is this because companies are protecting their IP or protecting their market share? And while I am on the subject, does it seem like some of the patents being defended (or filed for that matter) border on the obvious? Using multiple fingers to navigate is as old as books with table of contents; why is doing that on a touch screen ANY different? Just saying.... Perhaps, we could use some common sense (NAH never happen)!

2/15/2012 11:09 AM EST

I beleive Apple shot themselves in the foot by throwing the first punch trying to protect their market share. One on the previous commenters highlighted an important point - Apple has little or no innovation in the wireless space. Zero, zip, none. There are a few R&D giants out there who have significant innovation in wireless, and quite fairly so they need to protect their significant R&D investment. As yet, Apple may have refused to license from these Giants. Yet Apple has shipped significant volume resulting in significant revenue. If they are comming to the table only now to license they will be finding out that they owe back-license fees, but since they would not have negotiated BEFORE shipping in volume, the Giants would not be obligated to retro-actively license under FRAND since Apple would have deliberately infringed up until now. This opens up to punitive damages and retro-active non-FRAND terms. Apple's claim that Moto and Qualcomm cross-license seems like a desparate hail-mary move to me. I would be surprised if Qualcomm and others made this mistake, since their licensee is generally the phone manuficaturer not the chip manufacturer, as they get higher license fees from the total product BOM rather than the price of just the baseband chip. Is this fair to collect wireless royalties on a battery, screen and everything else that goes into a smartphone? Probably not to you or I, but this is the way the current world works. Apple made no friends by becomming litiguous, and now the sleeping Giants have awoken. To switch metaphors, I thunk Apple now has a frieght-train coming their way and it will be interesting to me to see how they avoid a collision. I might add all of the above that I wrote is hearsay, and would be interetsed to hear others inputs.