Qualcomm Wins US Antitrust Lawsuit Appeal Over Chip Licensing (venturebeat.com) 17
A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday reversed a lower court ruling against chip supplier Qualcomm in an antitrust lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission. From a report: The United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals also vacated an injunction that would have required Qualcomm to change its intellectual property licensing practices. The decision amounted to a near complete victory for the San Diego company, the largest supplier of chips for mobile phones and also a key generator of wireless communications intellectual property and industry standards. Qualcomm was fighting a May 2019 decision by U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California. That judge sided with antitrust regulators, writing that Qualcomm's practice of requiring phone makers to sign a patent license agreement before selling them chips "strangled competition" and harmed consumers.
The jokes are true, (Score:3)
The 9th is consistently the worst court. No wonder they get overturned so much.
why? (Score:2)
From Forbs.
its main anti-trust argument, was that Qualcomm used its market power to force others to pay higher royalties than they wanted to, and Qualcomm used this extra revenue to keep others from effectively competing with Qualcomm.
It is just not a good argument.
Re: (Score:2)
That's a rather poor summarization of "Qualcomm used its market dominance to extort additional fees for patents that had already had their rights exhausted". In layman's terms, once you sell your rights, you don't get to say in what someone does with that thing. You've "exhausted" your rights in that first sale [wikipedia.org].
Qualcomm sold patent licenses to manufacturers making chips that included Qualcomm's patented technology, at which point Qualcomm's patent rights should have been exhausted. Instead, once those chip
Except that's not true (Score:2)
You allege that Qualcomm sold chips...and then turned up later and demanded money. That is simply not true. Qualcomm wear there business on there shoulder.
Hell there are at least 5 makers of 5g.
You are just making Apples weak argument against Qualcomm which simply failed...the patents aren't frand so Apple have to pay. Get over it they lost.
This FTC/Apple thing smells of corruption. Any kind of view a 2trillion dollar company was bullied for 7.5 dollars a device is a nonsense. Hell they even used Intel's ch
Re:Except that's not true (Score:4, Interesting)
A) This issue pre-dates 5G by several years, and has to do with patent rights, not competition among "makers". There were many "makers" of the chips in question, but all of the patents still needed to be licensed from Qualcomm.
B) Qualcomm and Apple had an arrangement in which Qualcomm provided Apple with rebates of equal value for the amount that the manufacturers had already paid in licensing fees. If that alone isn'tpretty strong evidence that they were double-dipping on licensing, I don't know what is.
C) Apple wasn't anywhere close to being a $2T company when the alleged activity was taking place, they weren't using Intel modems, and they hadn't yet developed their own silicon. Qualcomm was the only game in town, even for a company like Apple.
D) Apple's suit against Qualcomm was a separate one, and it didn't fail. The two settled out of court, with Apple agreeing to continue licensing the patents.
Apple's hands aren't clean in this either, but that doesn't let Qualcomm off the hook for their misdeeds, which is why this is merely one of about a dozen different antitrust investigations around the world in the last few years with regards to these exact practices of Qualcomm's.
Re: (Score:2)
The thing is that you'll see a common argument that you see crop up in these kinds of cases. From the ruling:
Anticompetitive behavior is illegal under federal antitrust law, Hypercompetitive behavior is not.
The distinction that is made is if Qualcomm is actively sinking people trying to do the exact same thing they are doing, making these kinds of chips and dealing these kinds of deals. Let's say there's Wualcomm who's trying the same trick here. If Qualcomm is doing things to sink Wualcomm, then yeah, you have "anticompetitive" but if Qualcomm is putting the hustle on Wualcomm by signing Apple and e
Re: (Score:2)
The 9th never met an IP it didn't like.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh please. The FTC presented a watered down case before the court and the initial court went with it without probing deeper into the main argument. When Qualcomm moved on to appeal, that's exactly when the FTC should have double down and presented their mountain of evidence. I mean read Qualcomm's brief [uscourts.gov]. It's a pretty fucking brutal tongue lashing of the FTC and how their views rapidly morphed over the appeals process. Even the goddamn DoJ filed brief [uscourts.gov] indicating that the FTC was out of their damn leagu
Remember: "Intellectual property" is literally a p (Score:2)
It never protects any inventors or creators or engineers whatsoever. Those get their salary it they work, and get fired if they ever stop working.
It never protects any "hard work".
But if you did leech off a share of the income your employees made, despite not working yourself, to then use that money to pay such inventors etc, you get to call yourself an "investor". And somehow, that magically enables you to forego working altogether, just declare their creations "your" "property", erect a monopoly, cause ar
Don't Argee (Score:2)
There is so much wrong with IP. But paying someone to create some...and owning it not so much. They take the risk...not the engineer. Look at giants like RCA or more recently and relevant Nokia.
Re: (Score:2)
It never protects any inventors or creators or engineers whatsoever. Those get their salary it they work, and get fired if they ever stop working.
It never protects any "hard work".
If they're self-employed, they don't get a salary, but they do get residuals if they license their creations. It doesn't protect anyone who has signed a contract to assign their work to someone else, but that doesn't invalidate the concept.
Lucy Koh (Score:3)
I had forgotten Lucy she was involved in that great lawsuit, which TBH Samsung did badly in, but I remember this.
The monthlong trial between Apple and Samsung Electronics was nearing an end when Apple's lawyer presented an unwanted gift to the judge: a 75-page list of potential witnesses.. The judge, Lucy H. Koh, minced no words. "Unless you're smoking crack, you know these witnesses aren't going to be called when you have less than four hours," Judge Koh said to Apple's lawyers
Chip production is too restricted (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Chip production is expensive because it is hard at the leading edge. I’m not sure what you mean by open source fab because any of the chip foundries will make your chip if you are willing to pay. It may not be at the smallest feature sizes as they have plenty of customers already ahead of you.
SCOTUS get ready (Score:2)
I'm guessing this will go to a SCOTUS case.