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Samsung is the largest customer and licensee of Qualcomm chips and patents. The problem here isn't that Samsung doesn't want to license Qualcomm's patents, but
by tooltalk 9y ago
Samsung is the largest customer and licensee of Qualcomm chips and patents.
The problem here isn't that Samsung doesn't want to license Qualcomm's patents, but that Qualcomm DOES NOT license their patents to their baseband competitors (eg, Samsung, Mediatek, Intel); instead Qualcomm wants to collect royalties from the end-device makers (eg, HTC, Samsung Mobile).
This is precisely why anti-trust/competition regulators have been going after Qualcomm recently.
- kevin_thibedeau 9y agoPatent holders don't have to license anything if they don't want to. That's how patents work. It's not like QCom are NPE trolls. They actually did all the ground work of creating CDMA as a viable technology. The patent system is there to reward them for their research efforts.
- tooltalk 9y agoQualcomm's wireless patents are Standard Essential Patents (SEP) and FRAND (Fair Reasonable Add Non-Discriminatory) encumbered. In other words, Qualcomm voluntarily declared their wireless patents to Standard Setting Orgnizations (SSO) such as ETSI, ITU, etc to become part of standards that all chipmakers must implement. Qualcomm is, under their agreement with SSO's, required to license their wireless to all willing licensees at FRAND terms. In exchange for giving up their monopoly, Qualcomm gets guaranteed income from all uses of wireless standards such as LTE in baseband chips, or mobile phones.
- dbuder 9y agoThis is true but there is a growing feeling that 2 of the 5 radios on my device shouldn't get to make up >20% of my BOM on their license alone. While the poster above you is right that they're aren't trolls per se, some of those patents (and there are a lot, all clustered around a few areas) are broad and vague and more of a wide claim than a useful description of something new.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]