Today’s smartphone is more powerful than a supercomputer of just 20 years ago. It is an immensely complex device. In fact, more than one in six (16%) of all active U.S. patents are smartphone-related. Because of this complexity, smartphones for the last several years have been the epicenter of intellectual property disputes in high technology. Nearly every mobile, software, chip and Internet firm has been involved in some legal battle.
Our intellectual property laws and regulatory agencies, however, are in many ways not suited to the realities of the modern smartphone world. Our rules never contemplated anything so complicated. In some cases, reform of the old institutions is in order. In other cases, merely a little common sense will do.
In the latest bout, Nvidia, a leading supplier of graphics processing units (GPU) is suing Qualcomm, the top maker of processors for mobile phones, and Samsung, whose popular smartphones and tablets contain Qualcomm chips. Nvidia claims that Qualcomm’s mobile processors violate some of its graphics patents. These are highly technical questions of silicon and algorithm design, and courts are sorting through them now. In the meantime, Nvidia is demanding royalties for use of the technology, and the three firms are said to be negotiating terms of a license.
Read the full piece in Computerworld.
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