
Appeal
There was always going to be an appeal regardless of who won.
Qualcomm's push into the PC arena is safe, at least for the moment, after a jury found its mobile processor designs had not violated Arm Holdings' licenses as the British chip designer had claimed. The decision came after five days of deliberations, marking the end of a more than two-year legal battle between Arm and one of …
The court gives great deference to a jury's ruling though, so the basis for appeal would have to be something the judge decided wrongly, such as decisions on handling objections and submissions of exhibits. Really hard to believe that ARM could turn this around, they've been hoping they could use this as a way to squeeze more money out of Qualcomm and justify their insane stock price. No such luck.
With ARM's contracts, at least as ARM described them, they had to demand destruction of the parts because there was no other remedy allowed. The next step, presumably, was for Qualcomm to go to ARM and ask if ARM would retract that demand for destruction if Qualcomm paid them some money, which they could negotiate. Qualcomm instead chose to challenge the accuracy of ARM's claim, and they apparently got a jury to decide that ARM was wrong after all. I'm pretty sure that ARM didn't want those destroyed, they just wanted every bit of leverage to convince Qualcomm to negotiate. They're probably quite angry now, so the question is whether they have opportunities to be vindictive and if they take them.
That jury verdict (on 2 of 3 counts) just makes ARM look like a pantaloonic buffoon who doesn't understand its very own business model imho -- and as such, this verdict makes no sense whatsoever!
Say I have a license to make pedal bikes, and I manufacture some, and pay royalties to the IP-holder of pedal bikes (who also invented motorbikes) at the pedal bike rate, and then I buy a motorbike startup company, and start manufacturing motorbikes but insist on paying royalties for them at the pedal bike rate, then I'm a shameless liar, crook, lawbreaking criminal, delinquent malefactor, rogue villainous swindler, thieving bandit, and racketeering scoundrel, all in one. And yes, past Snapdragons were pedal bikes, tricycles, or kids' draisiennes even, when compared to the current Oryon X Elite chips ... no contest, and no comparison!
I can't wait for Qualcomm to go off and start making its little plastic toy laptops using RISC-V chips. Leave ARM for the grown-ups who can properly handle powerful CPU archs!
Without access to the specifics, I also thought that ARM was more likely to have written this into their licenses. I don't like to bet, but if pressed, I would have guessed that ARM was more likely than Qualcomm to win here. That they haven't could mean that the jury simply got things very wrong, but it could also suggest that ARM did in fact mess up here. I have no reason to prove otherwise other than my instincts about how smart ARM's lawyers should be, and we do have to consider that these are either the same lawyers or close colleagues of the ones that persecuted someone who wrote a good textbook used to make things ARM needs on dubious trademark terms, so they aren't infallible. My instincts on their competence aren't strong enough for me to have confidence that the jury erred here. Maybe the trial on the remaining charge will give us more information.
>is still heavily dependent on the IP house's technology.
Imaginary property does not exist; https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html
What ARM provides is soft cores - depending on what proprietary contracts and NDAs a business signs, they can get from only the circuit topology form, the external wiring layout and an instruction set reference, to the verilog form and much more useful documentation, to integrate into a SoC.
ARM also licenses many general idea patents, which I guess sometimes might assist against other rent seekers, who like to pull out a patent a known general idea like a shift register and demand rent money.
Stallman licenses his article under copyright, which is actually a real law and is not imaginary.
He believes in one set of acceptable copyright licenses of works of opinion and another set of acceptable copyright licenses for functional works.
He is also of the opinion that noncommercial sharing of works should be permitted no matter the type, but he still does permit commercial distribution of all of his works, whether an opinion or functional.
"He believes in one set of acceptable copyright licenses of works of opinion and another set of acceptable copyright licenses for functional works."
Which is fine if you're discussing what you'd like copyright law to be, but completely meaningless when discussing what copyright law actually is. He already mixed those a bit too much for my liking in that essay, but you went the whole hog and started citing that source like it makes points about actual law which, in reality, are his opinions.
Does he believe in one set of rules for his creative works and another for those he wants to copy?
You mean like bits of Emacs?
(I'm surprised I only learned about this recently considering how much Stallman bangs on about this stuff....)