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Smartphone patent landscape

Dr Mark Summerfield has an interesting post demonstrating some work he and his colleagues have been doing modelling the ownership of patents in the smartphone space.

In their mobile technology landscape, or themescape, they seek to demonstrate pictorially:

  • Samsung appears to own key hardware patents;
  • Microsoft seems to own most software patents;
  • but Apple seems to have highly strategic patents.

The themescape also seeks to demonstrate that Google was a long way behind, but may be catching up if it gets to acquire Motorola’s patents.

Dr Summerfield does express some frustration:

It is therefore ironic – and some might say more than a little unfair – that Apple should be in a position to frustrate Samsung’s attempts to compete against its iPhone and iPad products, while the FRAND obligations associated with Samsung’s much larger patent portfolio leave it in a strategically weakened position.

In this context, it is hardly surprising that Samsung is in the Federal Court of Australia arguing that it should not be barred from obtaining an injunction against the iPhone 4S on the basis of the FRAND status of the patents which it is asserting against Apple.

But one might equally wonder why Samsung should be allowed to get injunctions on the basis of its so-called FRAND patents (assuming the fair and reasonable royalty is forthcoming) when it apparently volunteered its patents for inclusion into various standards in return for FRAND obligations? This FRAND-type issue has been around since at least the 1980s and led to this basic position.

Foss Patents also has a relatively recent round up of where many of the litigations between the various smartphone manufacturers currently sit.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 8th, 2011 at 6:19 pm and is filed under Patents, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • http://blog.patentology.com.au Patentology (Mark Summerfield)

    Thanks for your interest in the article.

    Just to clarify, however, I am not for one moment suggesting that Samsung should be allowed to evade its FRAND obligations, or that any patentee which willingly contributes technology to a standard should be permitted to hold any implementer of the standard to ransom.

    But there are complex legal and commercial issues involved.  In my view, the FRAND licensing regime ought to be allowed to operate such that it becomes commercially attractive for a company like Apple to cross-license its patents as a way to reduce license fees payable (which end up impacting the price of its products and/or its profit margins).

    If, for example, Apple is able to obtain the full benefit of Samsung’s FRAND patents for the cost of the royalty built into the price of a $20 Qualcomm part, and use this to compete against Samsung in the market for tablets and smartphones costing $600-$1000, then what exactly (in a commercial sense) is fair and reasonable about this situation?

    What would you suggest that Samsung should have done?  Had it not been willing to contribute its patented technologies to the standard on FRAND terms then it would have no mechanism to obtain a reasonable return on its investment in developing those technologies, from which an entire industry (incluidng Apple) benefits.  Instead, it would have had to pay someone else.

    If Apple wants to make the commercial choice to pay FRAND royalties, keep its ‘user experience’ technologies for itself, and charge a price premium for devices incorporating those technologies, then I have absolutely no problem with that.  On one view, what Samsung is asking the Federal Court to decide is whether Apple should be allowed to have its cake, and eat it too.

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