Qualcomm wants to ban imports of iPhones and iPads to the United States

Before going into the details of the new stage of the legal dispute between Apple and Qualcommit is worthwhile to at least list / recap what has happened so far.

Let's go:

Apple vs. QualcommImage: TechCrunch

In my view, the most extreme (not necessarily wrong, just the most radical) attitude in this whole story came from Apple, which stopped paying royalties while the dispute is still going on. As we have already said, this caused a great deal of financial damage at Qualcomm and it was more than obvious that it would act / counterattack with the same currency. Well, today the company filed a new lawsuit against Ma for patent infringement, as informed by Fortune.

The chip maker said Apple is violating six of its patents covering mobile technologies. The company also said that none of them are part of wireless industry standards, which are necessary for cell phones to communicate. Such a lawsuit was opened in Southern California.

In parallel, Qualcomm requested the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) to simply proves the import of iPhones and iPads to the United States which do not use their chips (but Intel's, which strangely was not included in the lawsuit after all, it is the one who makes such chips that are allegedly infringing on patents). According to Qualcomm, this possible ban could take up to 18 months to be analyzed by the commission, so, at least for now, iPhones are free to be imported.

Don Rosenberg, Qualcomm's attorney general, issued the following statement:

This is a very straightforward case: we have six patents that we are confident that (they) are infringing. Obviously, we are very concerned that Apple has unilaterally decided that it does not need to pay for the property it picks up and uses. We would be happy to license these patents to a volunteer licensee if they wanted to do business with us. Apple said it doesn't want to do business with us. This (litigation) also denies the notion that, in some way, our inventions are in the past. We keep inventing all the time.

Speaking of the infringement process for the six patents, Qualcomm apparently chose them hand in hand to prove to everyone that their inventions go beyond technologies called “essential” for the market and that they should be licensed under FRAND terms.

It was clear, here, that Qualcomm got tired of just defending itself and went on the attack. As we speak here in Rio, the plate heated up!