The judge A William Q Hayes of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California in San Diego has dismissed a request by Broadcom Corp. to declare some of Qualcomm Inc.'s patents on wireless chips "exhausted and unenforceable." Broadcom had sued Qualcomm in October accusing its rival of improperly using its wireless-technology patents to suppress competition. The judge ruled that Broadcom failed to identify the specific patents and called alleged injuries against the company "speculative."
The U.S. Supreme Court, on Monday February 23rd, rejected the Federal Trade Commission's bid to revive its finding that company Rambus Inc. (RMBS) engaged in illegal monopolistic behavior with an industry standard-setting group in the 1990s.
The FTC charged Rambus, which develops technology for enhancing the performance of memory chips, in 2002 with deceiving a group that was setting industrywide standards for computer memory technology. The commission alleged that Rambus hid its patent rights to four technologies that were eventually included in the industry standard, in order to collect excessive patent royalties from chipmakers that practiced the standard.
The Federal Trade Commission recently announced the third in a series of public hearings exploring the evolving market for intellectual property (IP). These hearings, to be held March 18 and 19, 2009, in Washington, DC, will examine the operation of markets for IP and technology and the impact of patent policies on those markets. These hearings will also explore how organizations and inventors from different industries use patents by enforcing exclusivity or licensing, and discuss the effect of recent judicial decisions, uncertainty in the patent system, and the notice function of patents on their decision-making. The Commission is seeking public comments on all issues until May 15, 2009. The FTC’s hearings on the Evolving IP Marketplace are free and open to the public.
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