Ch. Tronche's blog

“In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrong­ful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline.”

Mart­in Luther King, Jr.

The Patently-O blog conducted an informal survey by asking its readers “Overall, has your company made money from the patent system?”

On the software side, more companies describe themselves as “losing money” rather than “making money” from patents.

The result on Patently-O.

Not surprisingly, pharma companies see the opposite.

Judge Rules Novell Owns Key Software

This is part of my series “valuation of so-called intellectual property is much less than you may think” (at least, if you’re not one of my regular readers).
SCO was claiming “intellectual property” over UNIX software.

A federal judge rules otherwise.

In the middle of the day, SCO’s share was losing 72% hitting an all-time low of 0,35 $ a share, with volumes never seen before.

This is what you should be prepared for if you’re claiming your company is making money out of software “intellectual property”…

You may remember that Broadcom claims Qualcomm is infringing some of its patents, and thus got a ban on Qualcomm patents based cell phone chips.

On the other side, Qualcomm kept secret it was holding video compression patents during the H.264 standardization phase, and then tried to blackmail make money from it. However Qualcomm was found guilty of “patent ambush”.

Qualcomm apologized (but will appeal).

The lesson ? Qualcomm gonna have a hard time enforcing its patent, which is perfectly good under US laws until proven otherwise. This once again calls into question the valuation of a patent…

“If location [of R&D] was determined by cost, Silicon Valley would be empty.”

“[strategic planning] is important (…). But doing that thing well—execution—is what sets companies apart. Every football play is designed to go for a huge gain. The reason it doesn’t is because of execution—people drop balls, miss blocks, go to the wrong place, and so forth.”

Ruling Goes Against Qualcomm In Its Broadcom Patent Dispute.

There’s a ban going on preventing import in the US of cell phones based on some Qualcomm 3G patents.
This is a power-saving (software) related patent, by the way.

In some sense, Qualcomm, who is by no way stranger to patent wars, only reap the whirlwind it helped sewed.

But frankly, I find hard to distinguish between alleged “IP” (legally enforced monopoly) protection and plain archaic protectionism in that case. US consumers won’t be able to get access to world top-class cell phones, while the so-called “broadband” access they get is already notoriously lagging behind that of Europe and Asia (more on this, and the OECD full report). And I don’t mention IPTV. The US brought the Internet to the world, but one may wonder what role this IP obsession is playing in the rather slow rythm of telecommunications technology penetration there.