[quotemsg=19695232,0,137621]What Qualcomm is doing is perfectly legal. The logic behind the anti-trust cases are flawed. I think the wins against Qualcomm just show national bias. [/quotemsg]
The problem comes from the lifecycle of telecom standards and how they are managed. Qualcom had a big background in satellite communication, so they were in a good position to propose a new cellular standard (CDMA) back in the late 80's, early 90's. It got chosen, and rolled out, and they are locked in as sort of a monopoly owner of the technology.
When the next round of standards comes out, carriers want old and new to work side by side while they are rolling them out. So the next round of standards includes backward compatibility aspects that keep aspects of the monopoly alive. Plus, some of it is just good design, so it is incorporated into the next design, maybe tweaked a bit, so that restarts the clock on the intellectual property. Oh, and maybe this next round of standards is also done by Qualcom, so now they end up with a monopoly on a whole new generation of the technology, along with everything else.
Part of the problem goes back to our patent system. But the telecom associations could solve it, make it part of the rollout of a new standard that the chosen technology automatically goes public domain after a fixed period of time, or has to be transfered to the association instead of held by the original developer. One example sort of like this - the GSM standards from europe have always been documents you can download for free. The CDMA documents from the US have always been something you must pay for.
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