InterDigital Inc (IDCC)

[olddog967]

Paullee: My comments on ASUS
As a non lawyer I don’t know why the case has not been finalized since almost all of ASUS’s claims have been dismissed and the remaining Sherman act claim is questionable .

ASUS’s original filing contained a long list of assorted complaints. Since then as a result of arbitration rulings and the Judge’s decisions against ASUS, the main complaint remaining to be acted upon is a violation of the Sherman Act. Since cases that involve anti trust violations are complicated and are based on a lot of theoretical evidence, ASUS’s lawyers must hope that they will be able to convince a lay jury that IDCC did some thing wrong.

The following comment from the recent 10-K, is the most recent example of ASUS claims being rejected:

“On December 20, 2018, the CA Northern District Court issued an order on the parties’ motions for summary judgment. InterDigital’s motion was granted in part and denied in part, and Asus’s motion was denied in its entirety. The court: (1) granted summary judgment that Asus is judicially estopped from arguing that the 2008 Asus PLA is not FRAND compliant in light of Asus’s prior inconsistent positions; (2) denied to the extent ruled on by the court InterDigital’s motion that issue preclusion prevents Asus from re-litigating issues decided in the arbitration; (3) granted summary judgment that Asus cannot invalidate the 2008 Asus PLA on the theory that, even if FRAND when signed, the 2008 Asus PLA became non-FRAND thereafter; (4) denied InterDigital’s motion for summary judgment that Asus’s Sherman Act claim fails as a matter of law; and (5) granted summary judgment that Asus’s promissory estoppel and California UCL claims fail as a matter of law. In addition, the court denied Asus’s motion for summary judgment that, as a matter of law, InterDigital breached its contractual obligation to license its essential patents on FRAND terms and conditions by engaging in discriminatory licensing practices.”

In regard to the Sherman Act and FRAND, last September, the head of the DOJ Antitrust Division issued the following policy statement:

“A unilateral violation of a FRAND commitment should not give rise to a cause of action under Section 2 of the Sherman Act, even if a patent holder is alleged to have misled or deceived a standard-setting organization with respect to its licensing intentions," Delrahim said. "Applying Section 2 to this sort of unilateral conduct would contravene the underlying policies of the antitrust laws.”

https://www.out-law.com/en/articles/2018/september/us-antitrust-law-wrong-tool-frand-breaches-/

As I previously posted, in implementing this policy in U-Blox’s case against IDCC. the DOJ filed with the Court a Statement of Interest against their Sherman Act complaint.

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