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Four Major iPhone Suppliers Join Apple in Countersuit Against Qualcomm
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LMAO! Are you serious with WiMAX? That was DEAD over 8yrs ago before HSPA arrived.
Apple wouldn't care; they have other chip suppliers.
Qualcomm can't withhold their IP from Apple. That's the whole point of standards and FRAND. We wouldn't have put Qualcomm's IP in to the standard in the first place (granting them a monopoly) if they didn't forfeit most of their monetisation rights.
That's the trade-off they made. Everyone absolutely must license your IP, but in return you must treat them fairly. FRAND is a pretty loose term. Apple are arguing that charging clients different prices for the same IP, based on other value-added features like being built from premium hardware materials or being well-designed, is not "fair".
Apple argues out of both sides of its mouth.
- They're quite happy to charge app developers based upon the app value, instead of a flat fee.
- They're really happy to charge banks based upon the amount of each Apple Pay purchase, instead of a flat fee.
- They demanded a percentage of the full profit of every phone that Samsung sold.
The sheer fact is, this is totally about money and wanting to change the way that cellular patents have been licensed for thirty plus years.
That's okay, btw. What's not okay is pretending it's about anything else, especially when you do such pricing yourself.
Those are totally unconnected businesses. Apple is under no legal obligation to price its AppStore or ApplePay services under any particular conditions, and the patents Samsung are accused of violating were never submitted for inclusion in any standard and are not encumbered by FRAND commitments. Apple doesn't need to defend their business practices; this case is about how Qualcomm have been operating, and whether that is consistent with said commitments.
You're conflating very, very different things in order to make it seem like everybody's doing it, and that it's a complicated mess where they're all equally culpable. That's not perceptive; it's lazy.
As it happens (and like I said, Apple has absolutely no need to defend it), the AppStore and ApplePay provide billing and card-processing services which always take a percentage of the total price. The reasons why that happens are complex and have to do with things like "Interchange fees" set by the card companies and banks, and absolutely nothing to do with FRAND licensing commitments for patents. The AppStore also offers much more than that, with a more complex calculation which involves paid apps subsidising the hosting of free ones, employing App-reviewers and content editors (the iOS 11 AppStore in particular is full of curated content), paying for CloudKit and push-notification servers, etc. Again, none of that has anything to do with the issue at hand. Apple never made legally-binding commitments to price their products/services in particular ways; Qualcomm did.
Nor does voluntarily contributing patents to be FRAND under ETSI rules bind any particular rate method, beyond the requirement that the same rate structures be available to all.
In fact, the ETSI FRAND contract, which most people talking about FRAND have never bothered to read, says nothing about pricing and even states that requiring cross-licensing is okay:
The point of my post was that billing by product price is considered neither an uncommon nor unreasonable method. Being FRAND does not mean that billing method becomes unavailable. As the ITC noted against Apple when it banned iPhones, at another time that Apple claimed such pricing was unusual:
Even the Chinese government, who famously does pretty much whatever it wishes, has recently ruled that phonemakers must pay Qualcomm by percentage of device price.
Too many people mistakenly think that the issues that other companies and governments have, are all about pricing by device cost. Instead, the actual thrust is about changing other Qualcomm actions, such as not giving a pricing break for the value of cross licensed patents, and requiring purchase of their entire patent license even if only part is needed. (Although such was not uncommon in ETSI as well.)
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Perhaps they refuse to help on this. taiwan-component-makers-refuse-to-lower-quotes-for-iphone-7-parts.1988810
Oh, yes you do - all the time.
But they don't have the loudest voices, and are easily drowned out by the Government and the sensationalist media.
Terrorism is more dramatic. It sells better.