The legal spat between Broadcom and Qualcomm may have been partially settled out of court a few weeks back, but the legal wheels that have already been set in motion will have to grind slowly to completion.
And so it is that Broadcom’s recent court win in front of a jury confirming that it need not pay Qualcomm royalties in order to use the H.264 compression standard, has been upheld by a federal court, the company said this week, and remedies for Qualcomm and its claim to part of the H.264 patents will be considered in the days ahead.
If you remember the patent was upheld and it was shown that Qualcomm had correctly applied for a patent but that it failed to point this out to the standards bodies MPEG and the ITU.
There was a patent pool put together for H.264 which included everyone that helped build the H.264 technology except Qualcomm, such as Daewoo, France Telecom, the Fraunhofer institute, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Philips, LG Electronics, LSI Logic, Matsushita, Microsoft, Mitsubishi, Samsung, Sharp, Siemens, Sony, Toshiba and JVC to name but a few. H.264 technology is at the heart of devices like iPods, DVRs, set tops, DVD players and where video enabled, cellular handsets.
The Federal court agreed with the jury finding, saying that Qualcomm had violated its duty to disclose patents and likened it to a previous decision in the computer industry against Rambus, which tried to control chip memory for PCs back in the early 1990s in much the same way. In effect the Judge has said that Qualcomm has waived its rights to enforce the patents.
The remaining actions to go before courts are all those where Broadcom has filed against Qualcomm, all asserting that Qualcomm uses Broadcom patents in its chips. Broadcom is also part of an anti-trust complaint in Europe along with other companies, and has filed complaints with the Korean Fair Trade Commission. It has also started an appeal of the US anti-trust case that it brought against Qualcomm which was dismissed by a lower US court last year.
The fight all broke out when Samsung agreed to go to Broadcom for CDMA chips rather than Qualcomm. Samsung has been a lynchpin of Qualcomm CDMA business in the past.