XDX and Kent
I believe the confusion is over the defense asserted by Nok claiming that the ITC proceedings should apply French Law rather than US Law to its investigations. The French Expert testified that each essential patent claim must have a separate license which is assumed to be under license upon declaration of the patent thereby allowing legal useage until the terms are agreed to be fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory. He attempted to justify the matter by citing a clause in ETSI that stated the laws of France would govern. However, my memory is not what it used to be, but the section stating governing law was the challenging of a declared patent to ETSI before final standards language or if the declarer stated that they would not license the technology. Provisions were set out for the amendment of the proposed standard to exclude the patent claims in these instances. Further, ETSI made a subsequent statement that it never intended and does not desire to interfere with the customary business of licensing between parties.
There are many holes in the French Expert's opinion and the ITC did not buy into it or they would have ceased the investigation.
The real problem involves MEN who have been attacking IDCC for damn near 20 years. Motorola was it early, then Ericy and now Nok. If you look back, Nok licensed 2 and 3g with IDCC, but two significant matters were contained in the licenses that stand out like a sore thumb. The first is that no royalty liability would begin unless Mot or Ericy licensed with IDCC. The second was that Nok could challenge the IDCC portfolio at any time which was directly contrary to the US law at that time. Clearly the three parties were working together in 1998 when the Nok/IDCC deal was being negotiated. The Nok lawyer in his argument before Judge Lynn when attempting to intervene in the dismissed ERicy/IDCC case stated "this was not supposed to happen" referring to the settlement. Now, unless this gentleman was the son of Carnac, he had obviously been informed that MEN stood all for one and one for all in its effort to close IDCC. Now return to present day and guess who the 3 holdouts are in not agreeing to license 3g? Yep, MEN is still at it.
IDCC has had several chances to litigate the behavior of these three companies and has opted to pass. I do not believe the DOJ has any blame and I also believe they are powerless to do anything about the situation. These guys were not planning on antitrust areas, they wanted to force IDCC to shut their doors before they were financially able to really fight. Their own scheme blew up in their face when the USPTO reviewed and blessed off on a few remaining patent claims forcing Ericy to settle in Dallas right after they had just lost a jury trial in Judge Lynn's Court to another patent holder.
While we as shareholders feel outrage, an independent third party is not going to lose sleep over a company with no debt and a half billion dollars in the bank.
MO
loop
AI
