I'm typing this while Fish & Richardson's Ruffin Cordell is still delivering Apple's opening statement in the Apple v. Qualcomm antitrust trial here in San Diego (Southern District of California). There are two key points made in the first half of the statement that are going to make things hard for Qualcomm to persuade the jury of its own story:
Mr. Cordell made a point that is very obvious: why would Qualcomm impose gag clauses with multi-billion dollar penalties attached on its customers if it had nothing to hide? The fact that Qualcomm insisted on contract terms that would make it economically irresponsible under most circumstances for companies to ask competition enforcement agencies for help indeed speaks volumes. It's about covering up misdeeds.
It will be hard for Qualcomm to explain this away. It's not just that companies entering into business agreements with other companies want some peace of mind. They don't want to sign a contract one day and be sued the next day. But government agencies in charge of antitrust enforcement don't just cause one company a lot of grief because another company asks them for it. They perform their own analysis, generally starting with a first plausibility check, followed by what some call "preliminary investigations" if there's enough smoke to suspect fire, and things get real only if those agencies reach independent conclusions. As for independence there certainly is no such agency in the world that would be in Apple's pocket because the United States is just too large an economy and too well-respected a democracy for one company to control the government and in other countries Apple is just a foreign entity.
So if Qualcomm had had a clear conscience, it would never have had to worry about a customer like Apple potentially complaining to independent government agencies because the agencies would just decline to investigate, or they would take a short look and stop wasting their time. Only someone who really has something to hide and, as a result, something to fear would do that. That Qualcomm had something to hide and therefore something (antitrust charges) to fear is evidenced by the battlemap chart I showed you in yesterday's post on the start of this trial (jury selection). In the aggregate, Qualcomm has been fined to the tune of many billions of dollars by regulators on multiple continents, which I once called the "Antitrust Grand Slam."
The next context in which common sense complicates things for Qualcomm is the question of the royalty base. Qualcomm's royalty is based on the entire device. There is a cap now ($400), but it's dozens of times higher than the market value of a modem chips. So Qualcomm collects royalties--as Qualcomm told the IRS--on the whole enchilada because it's "humongously more lucrative." But this means they charge for parts of the product they don't actually make any technical contribution to.
The key term is "royalty base": What is the 100% basis against which whatever reasonable royalty percentage should be applied? Is the 100% a $1,000 phone? A hypothetical $400 phone? Or should it be a baseband processor (also called modem chip, or modem processor, or baseband chip)--which Qualcomm itself sells at $20 per unit and others sell at $10 or less?
If Apple wins the royalty-base part, it's within striking distance of convincing the jury of Qualcomm's terms being unreasonable. They have other ways, such as (what came up later in the opening argument) a comparison between what Qualcomm collects per unit vs. other companies like Ericsson that may hold even more standard-essential patents. But what I think may have the greatest persuasive impact here is the following point Mr. Cordell made:
A smartphone is a mobile computer, with conventional telephone functionality representing just a limited part of it. But most of that smartphone functionality--such as playing computer games, listening to music, watching or recording videos--works over WiFi, too! And if something works over WiFi (in fact, many of those apps work better over WiFi than over cellular networks, which are slower and less stable in general), then there's no plausible basis on which a cellular SEP holder can collect a royalty on the commercial value of the related computing functionality.
Mr. Cordell announced that Apple would get back to this point throughout the trial. I can see why. They won't have to talk about this every trial day, but when testimony--people confirming that everything works over WiFi (in fact, I quite often make WiFi calls where people call me on a cellular number or I call them)--shows to the jury that the very largest part of the value of an iPhone is not dependent on Qualcomm's modem chip technology, Qualcomm is going to have a problem persuading the jury of the opposite.
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