A handful of mobile heavyweights, including the likes of Nokia, Ericsson, NEC and Alcatel-Lucent have announced they’ve got together and worked out a patent sharing system for the development of HSDPA’s successor, LTE.
The framework will give all of the company “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms” for licensing each other’s essential patents. The deal will also make sure that those involved can’t charge royalties that are more than a single digit percentage of the sales price of phones using their patents and for embedded LTE modems, the maximum level will be a “single digit dollar amount”.
Getting the patent regime – and particularly the pricing – for using patents agreed before anyone starts using them is a simple but very clever idea. Perhaps if Nokia and Qualcomm had set up a similar agreement they could have saved themselves a truckload in legal fees.
Do you have any details as for the terms of the patent swap?
Do you have any details as for the terms of the patent swap?
Do you have any details as for the terms of the patent swap?