Apple Sues Qualcomm For Roughly $1 Billion Over Royalties (cnbc.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Apple is suing Qualcomm for roughly $1 billion, saying Qualcomm has been "charging royalties for technologies they have nothing to do with." The suit follows the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's lawsuit against Qualcomm earlier this week over unfair patent licensing practices. Apple says that Qualcomm has taken "radical steps," including "withholding nearly $1 billion in payments from Apple as retaliation for responding truthfully to law enforcement agencies investigating them." Apple added, "Despite being just one of over a dozen companies who contributed to basic cellular standards, Qualcomm insists on charging Apple at least five times more in payments than all the other cellular patent licensors we have agreements with combined." Apple also alleges that once it began cooperating with Korean authorities' antitrust investigation of Qualcomm, the company withheld $1 billion in retaliation. Korean regulators fined Qualcomm $854 million for unfair trade practices in December.

Comments

Re:Nope

[TechyImmigrant]

Apple's highly innovative inventions, namely flat rectangle with a screen on it, and an arrangement of icons in a grid clearly constitute innovations of incalculable value. Where as Qualcomm's patents simply involve leading edge telecommunication developments that far surpass most of their rivals in performance. Obviously, nothing special. Surely not noteworthy enough for their extensive paten portfolio, one of the largest in the wireless world, to justify 5x the royalty rates.

And yet WiMax far outperformed anything the Q was doing at the time and is still competitive with LTE today. This is because lots of other companies can do telecommunication tech too and in particular, the computer companies liked 802 data networks,which make much more sense than the ITU protocols if you're sending more IP traffic than voice traffic and so 802.16 came into being. It was great while it lasted. I still have my WiMax dongle and it was fast at a time that 3G phones were a joke in terms of fast data communications.