Gonna share a personal theory about what might be going on in settlement negotiations right now. It's just some speculation to pass the time as we wait for news and had to reach quite a bit to connect some of the dots.
Gotta believe that Nokia is pushing every button they can find to keep from paying a penny more in IPR royalties than they absolutely have to. We are well aware of the buttons Nokia is pushing on InterDigital, but wondered if maybe there are some other buttons getting pushed as well. Awhile back IDCC mentioned that "indemnification" was one of the issues being encountered as they negotiated license agreements with some parties.
After looking into the idea of "indemnification" a bit I came to the conclusion that QCOM and the early 2G CDMA standards were the most likely suspects mostly because of the following;(taken from IDCC's most recent 10K with my highlights added for emphasis on key points);
"Additionally, in 1994 we entered into a paid-up CDMA-based patent license agreement with QUALCOMM, Inc. (QUALCOMM) that is limited in scope. The QUALCOMM license excludes, among other things, any rights under our patents as regards TDMA standards, any rights under any of our patent applications filed after March 7, 1995, any rights under the patents and applications subsequently acquired, such as was the case with Windshift, and any rights to any patents relating to cellular overlay and interference cancellation.
The QUALCOMM license agreement grants QUALCOMM the paid-up right to grant sub-licenses under designated patent and patent applications to QUALCOMM’s customers. For some of our patents, QUALCOMM’s sublicensing rights are limited to those situations where QUALCOMM is selling ASICs to the customer. For a limited number of patents as to which applications were filed prior to March 8, 1995, QUALCOMM may grant licenses under such ITC patents regardless of whether the customer is also purchasing an ASIC from QUALCOMM.
Based on these limitations, QUALCOMM is not licensed under either all of our patents that we believe are essential to 3G, including cdma2000, or all of the inventions which we believe will be essential and which are contained in pending patent applications. The proportion of essential Company patents under which QUALCOMM is licensed has diminished substantially over time as the Company has been inventing and acquiring technology at an accelerating rate since early 1995."
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Two points that appeared to be made clear by those disclosures and statements are as follows;
1) QCOM secured IPR rights from InterDigital that allowed them to offer ALL of the "essential" IPR they did not already have for their early IS/95 "narrowband" CDMA wireless technology. That means they could, and probable did IMO, include an "indemnification" provision in license contracts for THAT early version of the "narrowband" CDMA standard.(i.e., QCOM had it all and could offer "one stop shopping" for IPR on IS/95)
2) InterDigital goes on to point out that CURRENT versions of the "narrowband" CDMA standards(i.e., "including CDMA2000") contain "essential" IPR that is owned by InterDigital and that is beyond the limits of their 1994 settlement agreement with QCOM.(i.e., QCOM no longer has it all, and InterDigital wants to be paid for the IPR that it owns and contributed)
If we consider that Nokia has had a 2G license with QCOM since the early days and probably demanded "indemnification" against paying anybody else for IS/95 IPR before signing that license,...IMO it's not much of a reach to speculate that Nokia wants QCOM to step up with them in negotiating "narrowband" CDMA payment obligations with InterDigital.(If, in fact, QCOM was actually offering such a thing as "indemnification(?) - but why else would they pay InterDigital millions for a few key 2G CDMA IPR rights they did not already own back then?)
Reaching a bit further out on that limb... it's possible that QCOM failed to completely and explicitly extinguish all of the "indemnification" provisions in Nokia's license for earlier versions of 2G CDMA when that license was "upgraded" to cover later versions of 2G and 3G CDMA. Maybe there are enough "loose ends" left for Nokia to start pulling on that old QCOM "indemnification" provision in hopes of having THEM pony up some of the loot that Nokia is about to begin paying InterDigital for both 2G and 3G "narrowband" CDMA.
Guessing that it would take some time for those three parties to reach agreement on exactly when InterDigital's IPR outside the 1994 agreement with QCOM became "essential" in the 2G standards, how much it was worth compared to everything else, and who was going to pay it.
If that is the case(??), then maybe there are also some conditions specified in that old QCOM indemnification clause requiring Nokia to "engage and defend" any claims made against it before OCOM's liability becomes effective. (Reached all the way out to the last dot in this story with that last idea.)
Maybe Nokia's recent legal initiative(i.e. the Delaware action), is really about demonstrating an effective defense against InterDigital's demands for payments on "narrowband" CDMA(see texb's ref post), AND about bringing QCOM into the discussion.
AI
