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

No honor among thieves

[JoeyRox]

"The FTC claims that to prevent Apple from launching a WiMax iPhone after Sprint deployed its first WiMax network in 2008, Qualcomm 'agreed to rebate to Apple royalties' received from the iPhone maker's contract manufacturers 'in excess of a specified per-handset cap.' In other words, Qualcomm allegedly let Apple pay lower royalties to secure a long-term spot in the iPhone, lock rivals out of the baseband market, and deal a fatal blow to the WiMax standard."

http://www.fool.com/investing/...

Nope

[PortHaven]

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.

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.

Re:Nope

[TechyImmigrant]

according to some RANDOM dude who had nothing to do with WIMax standards ;)

Actually I was the primary author of the WiMAX/802.16 PKMv2 security protocol.
Also I'm the primary designer of current Intel RNGs.

Meanwhile, they ignore royalties owed to Ericsson

[Anonymous Coward]

for real, bonafide, genuine inventions in radio-communication (unlike their own go-sue material, shapes of buttons on a screen and what direction they slide in), and they refuse paying Ericsson simply because they are confident their dishonest American courts will side with them so they can get away with it.

A bunch of dishonest fuckers and hypocrites is what Apple's management are.

Re:Eudora is dead

[sandbagger]

I loved Eudora. A great mail client.

Re:Who cares —Where's my Mac Pro Tower

[TheFakeTimCook]

Seriously! Not sure why a company that big and rich can't roll out updated hardware every year or so. The lineup of desktop stuff is quite sad and embarrassing.

The last MacBook Pro was 2015. The new one is 2016. Sounds like "about a year" to me...

The last iMac was late 2014. The new one was supposed to be about the same time in 2016, but, from what I have read, Intel is behind in releasing the CPUs they want to use. Look for a mid 2017 release. Hopefully, that will tricke-down to a new Mac mini...

As for the Mac Pro, again, it is Intel that has been holding up the works. There have been new Xeons released; but, not only are they not significantly faster, a lot of the variants are simply not suitable for use in the MAC Pro. FORTUNATELY, that is no longer the case, because the Skylake-based Xeons that would allow the Mac Pro to move to the highly-desirable USB-C/TB3 for all I/O are (finally) scheduled for early 2017 production, which means that Apple has probably had Engineering Samples for a few months now. Hopefully, that will translate into an updated Pro around the same time as the new iMac and mini.

OK, I'm confused...

[GerryGilmore]

If Apple is making regular royalty payments to Qualcomm. If so, how does this statement from Apple that QC is "withholding nearly $1 billion in payments from Apple as retaliation for..." make any sense? Is QC refusing to cash the check? Asking for bigger payments? Genuinely confused.

Enough FFS

[Godwin O'Hitler]

Is anybody, like me, sick of all these patent squabbles?
Welcome to the 21st century shitpile.