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U.S. Bans Some Cellphones For Patent Reasons
runner_one writes "According to the New York Times, A federal agency has banned imports of new cellphones made with Qualcomm semiconductors because the chips violate a patent held by Broadcom. The International Trade Commission said today that the import ban would not apply to mobile phone models that were imported on or before June 7." Update: 06/08 13:05 GMT by KD : Glenn Fleishman notes that Apple's iPhone will be allowed into the country, since it doesn't use any 3G chips. He adds that Apple "might have the most advanced smartphone on the market unless President Bush or his trade representative overturn the ruling (which they have the power to do)."
How exactly does the free market go about fixing limited duration government granted monopolies (a.k.a. patents)?
It says that it found a violation on U.S. Patent No. 6,714,983. Here's the link to the patent.
One thing to note is that the ITC investigates and makes recommendations to congress and the president. It's not actually a court of law or policy making body. So I think this from the article: isn't really true. Especially when later in the article it states that the government has 60 days to approve or overturn the order made by the ITC.
Qualcomm has been aggressive in promoting their patent rights. But to say
that they are unique in this field is completely ignoring one side of the story.
Every try to make something in the GSM/UMTS space? You will have about a dozen companies
approach you with their hands out. Nokia, Qualcomm, Ericcson, Motorola, Lucent, Samsung
and several others. CDMA royalties are about 5%, almost all paid to Qualcomm. GSM/UMTS
royalties sum up to about 18%. The only difference is that if you are one of the big guys,
you "cross-license" your patents so that you don't end up actually paying anything. If you
are a new entrant... well, you are out of luck.
What is pissing off the Nokias, Ericcsons and Broadcomms of the world is that in the CDMA space,
they have no patents at all. None. That is because they fought CDMA every step of the way until Qualcomm
demonstrated conclusively that it is a commercially practical technology. Then they
turned around and tried to claim it as their own, and tried to co-opt it by applying it with minor
modifications to the UMTS space.
Actually, I am amazed that Broadcomm is getting away with this. Their sum total of contributions to
the wireless space is close to zero. They have done some work in the wireline world in the early
years, but they have contributed zip, zilch, nada in the development of wireless IP. They are not
even a name in the industry. HOwever, it is possible that they have purchased some IPR of late.
I am quite happy to see cracks in the patent edifice as a whole, but making Qualcomm the villain in
this is not correct. Qualcomm laid many of the foundations for modern wireless communications technology;
Qualcomm corporate R&D is about as close as you can get to how Bell Labs used to be.
Lots of Qualcomm's IPR consists of non-trivial, non-obvious, fundamental contributions to communications
theory. Most other wireless companies, in particular Nokia, Motorola, Ericcson etc have done nothing
fundamental in the past 15 years. They are product companies whose forte consists of taking old technologies
and packaging them in crowd-pleasing form factors, or (in the case of Ericcson), maintaining relationships
with behemoth carriers.
Magnus
Yes, that is a work-around. Notice, however, that the whole patent system was originally created to help sharing of information, namely inventions. If you made an invention and made it publicly available, in return the government granted you a limited monopoly.
Nowadays, this has twisted into reality where government grants you a monopoly and you absolute do not share your "invention". Instead, you use your monopoly to prevent related innovation by others. The government grants you (limited) monopoly and in return you share a piece of document that, more often than not, shares zero information about the real invention you possibly did. In case of software, the only thing that really could describe your invention correctly would be the source code. However, that is not required to get a software patent. That's where the problem is - you can get a patent to protect your invention without disclosing that very same invention.
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