Friday, March 23, 2007

More on Qualcomm and H.264

Further to earlier reports on the Qualcomm/Broadcom saga, the district court judge found inequitable conduct on the part of Qualcomm in the H.264 business.

Collateral damage is done to Jaffe and Lerner's Innovation and Its Discontents, who had praised Qualcomm as a "good" user of patents, and dumped all over Rambus. This is but another problem in the two-dimensional cartoonish characterizations in the Jaffe/Lerner book.

From IPFrontline:

The intellectual property world of Jaffe and Lerner is populated by good guys and bad guys.

At pages 35-37, Jaffe and Lerner identify both Qualcomm and Biogen as companies that use patents in appropriate manners. However, one notes that Qualcomm suffered a reverse in January 2007 in its attempt to use patents to control the H.264 standard.
Of Biogen, Jaffe and Lerner neglected to mention the case of NOELLE v. LEDERMAN, 355 F.3d 1343, 69 U.S.P.Q.2D 1508 (CAFC 2004), wherein Biogen and Idec were fighting over discoveries made with federal funding. SEE HERE and HERE

Rambus is targeted by Jaffe and Lerner as a company that engaged in an extended campaign to abuse the patent system, in large part because of its attempts to patent industry standards. [p. 69] Of Rambus v. Infineon, TechLawJournal gives a more accurate discussion of the Federal Circuit's decision than is found in Innovation and Its Discontents.



from technewsworld:

The district court ruling is a victory for rival Broadcom in a wide-ranging legal battle between the two wireless technology companies. It came amid a two-day public hearing before the U.S. International Trade Commission [ITC] in Washington on another one of their patent disputes.

U.S. District Judge Rudi Brewster agreed with the advisory ruling, saying evidence showed Qualcomm waived rights to enforce the patents "by its silence in the face of a 'clear duty to speak.'" [IPBiz to Jaffe and Lerner: read this well!] He scheduled a May 2 hearing to consider a penalty.

In a partial victory for Qualcomm, Brewster rejected Broadcom's claim that Qualcomm misled the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by withholding relevant scientific articles.

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