Judge Says that Qualcomm Acted in Bad Faith, Loses Patent Rights

The concealing of existing or likely future patents seems to be all to common in standards setting, and now a Judge has slapped down Qualcomm for engaging in "an organized program of litigation misconduct" in a patent suit against Broadcom.

This is big, and this is good. One of the more sophisticated methods of patent trolling out there is to concealed patented, or patent pending, product when one sits on standards making bodies, and when the standard is widely accepted, it's time send out demand letters.

Then again, the ruling may be more narrow:

... in a patent case in San Diego, U.S. District Judge Rudi Brewster ruled that two Qualcomm patents related to video-compression technology can't be enforced because the company deliberately concealed the patents from a standards-setting group. Qualcomm compounded its misconduct by withholding evidence and making false statements before, during and after a trial in the case that ended in January, the judge concluded.

Another possibility is that this is more an artifact of telling blatantly transparent lies to a judge, which tends to piss them off.

Then again, this is getting interesting:

But after the surprise discovery during the trial of an initial set of relevant emails, Qualcomm found and later shared more than 200,000 emails and other documents with the court. After reviewing the documents, Judge Brewster concluded that Qualcomm engineers had participated in the group well before May 2003. He also rejected Qualcomm's suggestion that its failure to share evidence with Broadcom was an accident.

"The eventual collapse of Qualcomm's concealment efforts exposes the carefully orchestrated plan and the deadly determination of Qualcomm to achieve its goal of holding hostage the entire industry desiring to practice the H.264 standard," he concluded.

Broadcom, meanwhile, is pushing to find out more about whether senior Qualcomm executives knew of evidence that should have been disclosed sooner. It contends Qualcomm withheld information from other standard-setting bodies, too, a charge Qualcomm rejects.

"I think this is just a snapshot of their corporate behavior," said David J. Rosmann, Broadcom's vice president of intellectual-property litigation.

Pass the popcorn.