Slashdot Mirror
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.
"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/...
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.