Abusive contracts
Having worked for the Q, this is all about their abusive employment contract. The defendants likely did nothing wrong at all.
First, there’s no allegation that Arabi invented anything on company time, or using company resources. There’s therefore absolutely no reason at all that Q should logically lay claim to any invention! However, Q employment contract assert ownerships of any IP that its employees own. To show how crazy this is, they assert ownership of copyright if you write a children’s book over the weekend. They also think that if the employee invented something ten years before they even joined the company, and the patent comes up for renewal while you are working there, you somehow have to assign ownership to them, or face termination. It’s all totally illegal under U.K. law, which was demonstrated in both the above cases, that Q *actually decided to fight in court and lost*.
Second, there’s no real evidence that *their employee* did anything at all. The person named on the patent is the *sister*, a new graduate who perfectly could have invented this. And asked her older brother, a senior person in the industry, to help her with the process of patent filing and setting up a company. Hardly unlikely. They are actually accusing their employee of telling his sister “this is a well-known tech problem our industry faces, if you could invent a solution to that you’d be rich”. Only in the most delusional view is that a break of confidentiality.
But again, Q abusive contract to the rescue…..In Q, the contract controls not only what *you* can do, e.g. not be a director in of a registered company, something fairly problematic in itself when you think about it some more. Oh no. The contract also claims to somehow limit what your *relatives* are legally entitled to do. It even enumerates them exhaustively: sister, brother, mother, father, aunt, uncle, cousin up to once removed, mother or father in law, spouse, child. It’s just bizarre. I don’t know how Q lawyers think this could possibly be legally binding, but they actually think that they can tell you what your *sister* can or cannot do.
Hence this case. As far as Q is concerned, whether their employee invented the thing is actually irrelevant. Their follow-up claim is that they own the IP invented by employees sister. And that is why they brought this case. They and their lawyers were well aware of the facts before they bought the company, but in US law they couldn’t challenge the patent ownership because it had not yet been brought to commercial use, so there were no damages. So they were prepared to pay $150m purely to bring this as a *test case*. Their real goal is to have case law to be able to assert IP on all the relatives of the employee, not just employee themselves. The real targets of this are their employees in US locations with families in India and China - which is a very large percentage in their case. If this seems weird to you, you need to understand how Q sees itself. It sees itself as fundamentally an IP company, financially built on ownership of W-CDMA, UMTS and 5G patents. Not a tech company. Not a chip company that makes Snapdragons. The company Division that holds the IP rights rules the roost. They can (and have) made decisions sacrificing tens of billions of chip revenue, to ensure their strategic position in holding IP.
Reader after about two years of this, I made my excuses and left….
Biting the hand that feeds IT
