ellismd, like it or not, InterDigital had a 2G arbitration award, and reduction to judgment, in hand. The odds of Samsung overturning the award, and avoiding creditor's remedies, were essentially nonexistent.Under those circumstances, you apparently feel that InterDigital has the discretion to assign some greatly discounted value to the 2G portion of the settlement, and attribute a disproportionate amount to 3G, to establish a distorted 3G value as a pattern for future licensees.
I disagree, and suggest that the market value of the 2G component is essentially the liquidated amount of the outstanding arbitration award plus taxable interest. By analogy, if an employer gets an employee to sign forms establishing their relationship to be that of independent contractor, to avoid certain responsibilities of an employer, the government will ignore that legal fiction and assess the relationship pursuant to objective criteria. Likewise, if the settlement of a personal injury lawsuit is documented with language asserting all monies are being paid for "pain and suffering"(not taxable), and no monies are being paid for loss of earning capacity(which would be taxable), although claims had been made for disability compensation during the case, the IRS can independently pierce that fiction and tax the wage loss fair market value, notwithstanding the self-serving language in the release.
The same sort of thing will occur in the 2G/3G attribution, in my opinion.A fair market value, under the totality of the circumstances, will be assigned to the 2G component, irrespective of efforts to ignore the 2G liquidated damages that were in hand.
