If you read this blog from time to time you might have noticed that we have a "faible" for lawyers - and for companies who make use of them excessively. It is not that we have had bad experience with lawsuits ourselves to date, but I think the reason we detest the strong influence of patent lawyers in high-tech is that we consider most of them as entirely redundant. Of course there are parasites in any business, that's the nature of humans - and other species (animals and plants), too.

Now in this case Nokia is doing what the WSJ calls a "...preemptive legal strike against Qualcomm Inc. by filing complaints against the U.S. chipset manufacturer in Germany and the Netherlands." Often in such instances one does not know who is suing whom, and that is the intention. Parasites who have such tactics can become so big and so much part of a living being that at some point you don't know who the parasite really is.

As you can see I have absolutely no clue what this particular case is about. But one thing is of course certain. Qualcomm's existence depends on such patent royalty payments - legal or not legal - thanks to Mr. Jacobs' genius inventions in CDMA technology from long ago. His heirs have so far been chasing mobile TV and other things, albeit still relatively unsuccessfully. I think it is time they went back to doing new things again and spending their royalty money on that rather than on patent lawyers.

In South Korea people seem to be worried that Qualcomm, after acquiring Flarion's OFDM patents, would extend royalties to WiBro, the South Korean mobile WiMax version. That's at least what could be read in the South Korean Times and is a reaction to the US market analyst's (ABI Research) comments yesterday:

Experts worry Qualcomm's presence in the emerging OFDM intellectual property right market might undermine the commercial viability of WiBro, Korea's homegrown platform.
KT, the nation's biggest telecom company, looks to embark on the commercial services of WiBro late this year. Currently its pilot runs are underway.

Current announcements in the mobile TV space such as Qualcomm's success in the UK with B2Sky show that this early stage market is highly competitive, and the outcome of who is going to win is by no means clear. While the DVB-H folks have started a promising association with excellent members in the US, giving many talks and presentations, both the DMB supporters and Qualcomm, with MediaFlo, concentrate on sales and customer wins. This is certainly the right strategy, and the only one that will have an impact, because it is not so much the best technology as the one that does the job and is available at a good price that will win. Pricing on the other hand depends of course on the customer base, allowing economy of scale process savings.