Lenovo ordered to pay $140M for InterDigital patents – sees this as a 'major win' Lenovo must pay US patent holder InterDigital $138.7 million to settle a years-long licensing dispute for the use of technologies deemed essential to 3G, 4G, and 5G communications. The decision, handed down by London High Court Judge James Mellor on Thursday, mandating the Chinese OEM pay InterDigital a lump sum for all past …
>So why are we still using Lenovo systems in Law enforcement and Gov agency's?
Because not too long ago that Chinese company was actually building IBM's line of "Thinkpad" laptops. IBM decided that the business wasn't profitable enough for an American company (or something) so sold the business to their subcontractor.
Noe you might be able to weave a nefarious and torturous plot around this by the "CCP" or "PRC" or whatever but the reality is that it was a purely commercial decision. I daresay that the UK government could just purchase UK made laptops and stuff -- oh, wait, the UK doesn't make laptops (or indeed assemble them, much less make the components that go into them). So the short answer to why "we" are still using Chinese whatever is because you scrapped all the old ICT tabulators and ICL mainframes decades ago because of exactly the same commercial thinking.
Because not too long ago that Chinese company was actually building IBM's line of "Thinkpad" laptops. IBM decided that the business wasn't profitable enough for an American company (or something) so sold the business to their subcontractor.
Yeah. I was FURIOUS about that... and that was the moment I realized IBM had been on the "long downhill" for a while and they were never coming back up. Kind of sobering to realize the technology company of all technology companies that was a staple when I was growing up... was dying.
It isn't practical to assign a specific value to patents at the time a standard is created. How long would it have taken for LTE to become standardized if the committee was bogged down with a company saying their patent X should be 50 cents per device and the rest of the committee saying it is only worth 5 cents, multiplied by the thousands of patents involved?
Most of the disputes over FRAND aren't actually over what is "fair" - that's already been decided in the existing licenses Interdigital no doubt has, since they must be "non-discriminatory" they can't charge different prices for the same patent(s) to different licensees.
Most of the lawsuits we see making the news involve either patents created by companies that were not a part of the standards process and therefore aren't subject to FRAND, or over disputes related to FRAND terms (i.e. Qualcomm forcing licensing of other patents to be allowed to license their FRAND patents, or licensing FRAND patents based on the cost of whatever device the patent is used in) They could certainly do with some tightening up of the latter with a more explicit definition of whether Qualcomm's conduct is permissible, but that would only affect future standards not ones that were completed under less stringent rules.
Doesn't help.
The entire issue is simply that the manufacturers don't want to pay what is being asked, and unless it was a piffling amount, they never will want to.
They will always find it is worthwhile ignore, then claim "it doesn't apply to us", then eventually when the court says it does, to legally challenge the size of the bill and try to get it reduced, and then to try again to get it reduced more.
Of course the result of this is that the licensor knows that they will only get 1/3 of what they ask, that it will take a decade before they can collect anything, and that they will have to spend tens of millions on legal action to get it.
Thus they have to ask for 4x as much as they wanted to get in the first place.
And thus we also see that Qualcomm et al have to create a complex web of licensing and sales restrictions so they can actually collect a decent amount of money.
Without the cellular tech, an iphone would be an ipod or pda, and it would lose 2/3 of it's value - it is not unreasonable for the license fees to be a big chunk of the sell price.
Without the cellular tech, an iphone would be an ipod or pda, and it would lose 2/3 of it's value - it is not unreasonable for the license fees to be a big chunk of the sell price
What's stupid is charging different rates for an iPhone and some low end feature phone that has the same cellular tech. An iPhone is still useful without cellular - heck if I'm around wifi like I am most of the time I wouldn't even notice if the local cell tower fell over in a storm. A feature phone is completely useless without cellular, calling and texting is its sole purpose for existence.
If Qualcomm thinks their cellular patents are worth x amount, x should be the same whether it goes in a feature phone or an iPhone. The fact Apple adds a lot of other stuff that drives up the price like an OLED display, top quality cameras, high end SoC, face ID sensors, satellite communications, etc. etc. etc. shouldn't allow Qualcomm to charge more for the same patents. None of that stuff makes the fact the iPhone can use cellular worth more money, in what way does its ability to use cellular become more valuable because it has great cameras instead of a 2007 era grainy VGA camera, or has a high resolution 6.7" display instead of a monochrome 1.7" display?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
