InterDigital Inc (IDCC)

[Learning2vest]

Gotta say "thank you" to eneerg, dave davis, and rmarchma for bringing another bit of helpful info to our attention. Been doing a little dd this morning after seeing that independent report titled "3G Cellular Standards and Patents"(see link below provided by eneerg on AB, and brought to our attention here by dave davis).

It's always good to know what is out there for investors to read, and when something attempts to provide insight of IDCC's "essential" patents in the 3G standards, we need to know about it.

Took awhile for me to get comfortable with that report(it's just a start in the right direction IMO). FWIW, here are some of the key points that allowed me to get there;

1) That report is based on declarations made to the ETSI before 2004(see excerpt copied below with my emphasis);

"Another factor is the dynamic nature of both standards and intellectual property. By necessity, the standards cover existing proven technology, while patent applications describe novel techniques. Many of the patents were declared to be essential to technical specifications that were under consideration but not yet published when the patent applications were submitted. Both 3GPP and 3GPP2 continue to refine and enhance the standards. They regularly publish new and revised Technical Specifications, so that some of the patents that were judged not essential to specifications published before 2004 may be essential to present-day specifications or specifications to be published in the future. In addition, inventions that appeared in the databases in early 2004 as patent applications may now be embodied in published patents that are essential to 3G technology."

(My comment; The "source data" for that research has become "ancient history" now. IPR in 3G is a very dynamic truth at this point in time. What appeared to be true before 2004 could be better or worse by May of 2005. Let's see which way we think IDCC's "essential contributions" may have trended since then.)

2) What has changed in the ETSI data base of declarations since that research was done? Found what I was looking for in rmarchma's post #90841 here(thanks ronnie!), and copied/edited the answer as follows:


"IDCC has recently delared many more essential patents for both 2G and 3G, bringing the total issued US deemed essential patents to 114 for 2G and 257 for 3G. This is only the US totals, and not worldwide totals. IDCC did update its declarations to ETSI in April 2004, which I was not aware of until today. Now there are two ETSI declaration dates associated with the IDCC patents, 4/10/2001 and 4/8/2004. IDCC initially declared 69 essential US issued patents on 4/10/2001 to ETSI, comprised of 16 GSM/TDMA patents and 53 UMTS/CDMA patents. These patents are still listed under those same classifications. (my comment; IMO that's what this report was based on. Keep reading, it's gets a lot better!)

IDCC then declared 98 more essential US GSM issued patents to ETSI on 4/8/2004, which are classified under GSM only, not GSM/TDMA. Also IDCC declared 204 more 3G UMTS issued essential patents to ETSI on 4/8/2004 classified under UMTS only, not UMTS/CDMA. Thus the updated total is now 371 nonduplicated declared US (not worldwide) issued essential patents for IDCC, and 1 declared essential patent for Tantivy."(my comment; remember that the report only looked at declarations for 3G, and told us that some 2G declarations could also be deemed "essential". BTW- How about that declaration by Tantivy? Only 1 and we have at least 13 of 30 claims still cooking in the Lucent litigation! Things that make us go Hmmmm....!)

3) Lot's more ETSI declarations since that research was done, and more to come as IDCC's patent applications become approved patents.

4) By only looking at one declaration in each "family" of patents, the approach used in doing that research excluded all other patents associated with that specific area of invention. We know that InterDigital has maintained a very concentrated focus within the "air interface" portion of the standards, and that almost all of their contributions and declarations have been in just that very limited area(i.e., LOTS of patents in only a very few "family" designations). Leads me to believe that a "one per family" sampling approach would give a very conservative result on IDCC's contributions.

Link to referenced report;

http://www.3gworldguide.com/white_papers/IPR_and_3G.pdf