Judge: Qualcomm must license modem technology patents to third parties

A US federal judge has ordered chipmaker Qualcomm to license some of its modem technology patents to competing chipmakers, such as Intel and Apple.

In a preliminary ruling, the judge ruled that Qualcomm must license a number of patents essential to wireless modem standards to competitors, Reuters writes. After the judge reviewed the contracts, he concluded that if Qualcomm were allowed to keep these essential patents to itself, the chipmaker would achieve a monopoly in the modem chip market and restrict competing implementations with these components too much.

It concerns a lawsuit that the US Federal Trade Commission filed against Qualcomm in early 2017, in which the regulator accuses the chipmaker of anticompetitive behavior. Despite the preliminary ruling, the judge has not yet ruled on the central, larger question of whether Qualcomm has acted anticompetitively in order to maintain a monopoly on modem technology in smartphones. The FTC and Qualcomm asked the judge to delay the preliminary ruling by 30 days to reach a settlement, but that request was denied.

Qualcomm has long been embroiled in lawsuits accusing the company of anticompetitive behavior over its patents. The Taiwanese regulator, for example, accused Qualcomm of abusing patents in the field of mobile networks, although the chipmaker ultimately avoided a fine of 584 million euros by settling.

At the same time, Qualcomm has also been in conflict with Apple for some time, including over whether Qualcomm is charging too much for its patents. In September, Qualcomm claimed that Apple had stolen information about modems and passed it on to Intel. This concerns the question of whether Qualcomm’s diagnostic tools should also have been used to optimize Intel modems. Apple has switched to Intel-only modems for the first time for the iPhone XS and XS Max.