Broadcom's lawsuit accused Qualcomm of breaking a pledge to the standards board to be fair when licensing patents for its technology, which has been adopted as an industry standard to promote interoperability among handsets and carriers.
But we must develop an affordable and voluntary alternative that facilitates licensing for the vast majority of patents at fair, market-based prices, benefitting both sides of the patent equation.
The fair intendment of a patent assignment authorized by Congress is as much to be respected as the same meaning explicitly stated.
After all, at the end of the day, you may not want that awful, wagon wheel coffee table –but you may, indeed, want your fair share of any patent, trademark, copyright or royalty payments.
Specifically, Secretary Locke wrote to India's Commerce Minister, "I am particularly concerned that the US biopharmaceutical firm Gilead's HIV/AIDS drug Viread receives fair consideration" regarding its patent application.
The Justice Department, when it approved Google's acquisition of Motorola and the consortium's purchase of Nortel's patents earlier this year, issued a statement praising the "clear commitments" by Apple and Microsoft to license standard patents on fair terms.
Those rules oblige it to license "standard essential" patents on "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory" terms to any company.
Last week, Google wrote to standard-setting organizations around the world pledging to license Motorola patents on fair and reasonable terms if the deal succeeded.
Widespread industry practice is to allow inventors of technologies that are then incorporated into broad standards (such as 3G or 4G) to license their patents on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms ("FRAND").
Those claims are believed to be worth considerably less than what Oracle might have received had it prevailed on all of its allegations of copyright infringement – although, the lawyer for Oracle pointed out, there is no "fair use" exception over patents.
