U.S. FTC seeking to ‘redress and prevent recurrence of Qualcomm’s conduct’ through antitrust injunction

“The FTC and Qualcomm once intended to settle the antitrust litigation pending before Judge Lucy H. Koh in the Northern District of California by November 14, but we’re now just one month and one day away from the trial date and no agreement has been reached,” Florian Mueller writes for FOSS Patents. “But there’s been tremendous progress in the form of Judge Koh’s recent summary judgment order on Qualcomm’s obligation to extend standard-essential patent (SEP) licenses to rival chipset makers such as Intel.”

“On Thursday, the FTC and Qualcomm filed a joint final pretrial statement, which outlines (on page 4 of the PDF document) the remedies the FTC is going to fight for,” Mueller writes. “These prayers for injunctive relief suggest that the trial is going to be extremely interesting, and what will happen afterwards may be very significant.”

“In other news from last week, Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel scheduled the Apple v. Qualcomm trial in the Southern District of California to begin on April 15. It’s a safe assumption that Judge Koh,” Mueller writes, “will hand down her decision on the FTC case before the San Diego trial between Apple and Qualcomm. If Qualcomm’s ‘no license, no chips’ policy and other tying and various forms of threatening or discriminatory behavior came to an end and/or if Qualcomm’s contract terms prohibiting antitrust complaints were held illegal ahead of the trial in Southern California, Judge Curiel could presumably streamline his case in different ways, narrowing the issues to be put before the jury.”

Read more, including the injunctive relief sought by the FTC item by item, in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Suffice to say, Qualcomm’s modus operandi is going to change. The only question is by how much.

Qualcomm’s unreasonable, illogical, and irrational licensing scam, which charges a percentage of the total cost of all components in the phone, even non-Qualcomm components, must end.

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