Qualcomm in the clear: EC ends four year investigation

Big hitters Ericsson and Texas Instruments dropped their complaints against Qualcomm this week, leaving the way open for the EC to follow suit and end its investigation (or refocus its resources and priorities, as the EC put it in a statement).

The case had been running since October 2005 when Ericsson, Nokia, Broadcom, Panasonic, NEC and Texas Instruments filed coordinated complaints alleging that Qualcomm was both violating antitrust laws and breaching its own commitments to standard-setting bodies to license its declared essential patents on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms. In other words, that Qualcomm wasn't playing fair.

The EC case was as good as won when the two major instigators of the investigation - Nokia and Broadcom - came to individual agreements with Qualcomm over IP licencing and settled their cases. In effect, Qualcomm agreed to pull back on the amount of money it charges to license its WCDMA technology, an admission that it had been charging too much before. That in turn no doubt lead to some quiet understandings over the new deals that would be on offer if the other players followed suit and ended theirs.

So has some sort of lasting IP peace broken out?

"The thing to understand here is how much money is involved in these [intellectual property] negotiations," says Ben Wood, Director of Research at CCS Insight.