Qualcomm Seeks To Ban Imports And Sales of Apple iPhones in New Lawsuit (cnbc.com)

Chipmaker Qualcomm is asking U.S. trade regulators to ban iPhone imports, according to a new lawsuit. From a report: Apple has allegedly infringed on six of Qualcomm's patents, including technology that improves iPhone battery life, according to Qualcomm. Now Qualcomm wants Apple to pay damages. "Apple continues to use Qualcomm's technology while refusing to pay for it," Don Rosenberg, executive vice president and general counsel of Qualcomm, said in a statement. Qualcomm ultimately wants regulators to investigate which phones use cellular processors from Qualcomm's competitors, and halt sales of iPhones that violate the patents. Qualcomm said it has filed complaints in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California and with the United States International Trade Commission. It's not immediately clear how many iPhones that would affect.

Comments

Re:How many? Perhaps none.

[Penguinisto]

Not really - there's a difference between Samsung directly ripping off a design patent, and Apple being sued for buying chips for their phones from someone other than Qualcomm.

Re:SSDD

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. The US should have just done what China does: wait for someone else to go to the expense of actually inventing and developing something, then copy it without paying the inventors anything. Then just think of how 'advanced' the US cell phones would be!

Re:SSDD

[LynnwoodRooster]

A citation for you.

The six patents, U.S. Patent No. 8,633,936, U.S. Patent No. 8,698,558, U.S. Patent No. 8,487,658, U.S. Patent No. 8,838,949, U.S. Patent No. 9,535,490, and U.S. Patent No. 9,608,675 enable high performance in a smartphone while extending battery life. Each of the patents does so in a different way for different popular smartphone features; https://www.qualcomm.com/iphon... While the technologies covered by the patents are central to the performance of the iPhone, the six asserted patents are not essential to practice any standards in a mobile device or subject to a commitment to offer to license such patents.

These are not in the general patent common license pool, are not of any standards required for mobile devices, but Apple wants them anyway and is using them without paying for them.