The latest tack, though, is to deter lawsuits and royalty demands by acquiring patent portfolios.
Mr. Alfalahi declined to say whether Ericsson had raised its royalty demands, or by how much.
"We have longstanding concerns about patent abuses, including lawsuits and royalty demands targeting the Android ecosystem," Mr. Verney added, referring to Google's operating system for mobile devices.
He survived money-losing years, royalty demands from the players union and challenges from well-heeled competitors as his invention became the leading baseball board game.
In its suit, Ericsson also alleged that Samsung, in a bid to compel Ericsson to lower its royalty demands, had refused to license Samsung's own industry-standard patents that are essential for modern mobile telephony.
If the same methodology (50% of Apple's royalty demand) as for the other software-patents-only items was applied, we'd be talking about a few million dollars, not tens of millions.
Analysts have predicted it could cost Apple between $250m and $750m annually should the courts side with Ericsson over whether Ericsson's patent royalty demands were fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory given the fundamental nature of the technology for mobile devices.
Qualcomm has alienated carriers with its royalty demands; that's one reason they rather like the idea of using GPRS even though it doesn't have the best data rates.
The U.S. Supreme Court today ended a long patent battle over rights to a widely used HIV test, awarding a victory to Roche Molecular Systems Inc. (which developed and marketed the test) while rejecting the royalty demands of Stanford University (whose faculty conceived and patented the test).
Google countered that the two firms should have tried to negotiate a deal based on the starting point of a 2.25% royalty demand, which it described as "the only logical starting point" since it had agreed other licences on this basis.
