Finally, Lil’ Peace on Planet Mobile

Katie Fehrenbacher | Friday, February 23, 2007 | 8:33 AM PT | 3 comments

At least for this week, the mobile industry’s largest and most litigious companies laid down some of their arms and gave us oh-so brief warm and snuggly feelings. OK, with the exception of that whole Alcatel-Lucent/Microsoft thing.

Cisco’s battle over the iPhone ended with a shared trademark and some very vague plans to possibly, maybe, one day, explore interoperability between some products. Now Qualcomm and Broadcom and their pack-dog legal teams have called a truce on certain patent claims in their ongoing lawsuits.


Broadcom and Qualcomm say the companies have dismissed all claims and counterclaims associated with 2 patents belonging to Qualcomm and 2 patents belonging to Broadcom. The companies will not go to court in March, as previously scheduled. Though, that’s only an agreement over these patent disputes, and the companies will still battle over other issues. Qualcomm’s press release says that they and Broadcom are dismissing claims “with prejudice” so obviously this isn’t anywhere near the end of their issues.

But perhaps Qualcomm is feeling optimistic (generous?) now that they’ve gotten AT&T in their corner on MediaFLO. On Thursday Reuters quoted Qualcomm’s CEO Paul Jacobs as saying that he thought the AT&T deal might help talks with Nokia over renewing a technology license.

“The MediaFlo deal with Cingular is a new fact. Maybe there’s a way to find some new common ground there,” Jacobs said.

Maybe the companies are all getting as tired of spending money on legal disputes as we are of reading (and writing) about them. Or at least the ones with their endless monster legal proceedings. Nah, it’s probably more coincidence than anything else that there’s been a week of agreements. Well, for this week at least, we’ll hand around the peace pipe. Next week they can all start fighting again.

3 comments so far

February 23rd, 2007
10:03 AM PT
hank williams said:

“with prejudice” means that the claims cannot be raised again so when you say “so obviously this isn’t anywhere near the end of their issues.” I think the inference is inaccurate. At least on the issues that are being dismissed they cannot be raised again.

February 23rd, 2007
10:46 AM PT

You’re right - got caught up by the legal term.

February 23rd, 2007
3:21 PM PT

Hi Katie-
I work for PR firm in San Francisco and I think one of our clients would make a interesting blog. Can you send me your contact info? thanks so much
jackie

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