In a decision on December 31, US federal district judge James Selna of California granted Broadcom’s request for a permanent injunction against certain Qualcomm products in the US that were found to infringe three Broadcom patents in May 2007.
The three US patents, numbers 5,657,317, 6,847,686 and 6,389,010, cover technologies used in multimedia cellular phones.
Qualcomm has been embroiled in several patent disputes in recent years, including public hearings before the International Trade Commission (ITC) in a separate complaint filed by Broadcom, and patent lawsuits filed by mobile telephone maker Nokia in the US, UK, Germany and the Netherlands. The company is also under investigation by the European Commission after rivals accused it of breaching antitrust rules by abusing a dominant position.
Judge Selna’s order provides for a sunset provision on certain chips, which will allow Qualcomm to continue selling some of the infringing products through January 2009, provided that the company pays royalties to Broadcom. However, Qualcomm must immediately end sales of its third-generation Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (3G, WCDMA) chips, which were found to infringe Broadcom’s ‘686 video encoding patent.
Although Qualcomm plans to appeal the ruling and has announced that new, so-called work-around chips will become available before the end of March, the company acknowledged in a statement that the injunction “will likely have an immediate, short-term impact as handset customers transition to new designs for WCDMA products relating to the '686 patent, medium-term impact to certain products in the development pipeline for the US market, and longer-term ability to implement work-arounds in time for commercial availability of handsets by the January 2009 sunset expiration”.
In a statement, Broadcom’s senior vice-president and general counsel, David Dull, said the company was pleased with the ruling: “Broadcom should not have to compete against companies that use Broadcom's own patented technology against us, and this injunction puts a stop to Qualcomm doing just that."
