Judge Kills Broadcom Patent Lawsuit Against Qualcomm

From PC World: A U.S. judge has dismissed a patent lawsuit brought by chip maker Broadcom against rival Qualcomm, saying the company didn't identify specific patents it was suing over.

Judge William Hayes of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California dismissed the Broadcom complaint last Thursday. The judgment was made available late Friday.

Broadcom has a separate patent lawsuit pending against Qualcomm in the same district court. The two companies have filed several patent lawsuit against each other in recent years.

In this lawsuit, Broadcom had argued that Qualcomm was unfairly limiting competition by putting excessive conditions in its patent licensing terms. Qualcomm licensed its chipset-related patents to other chip makers on the condition that they only sell their products to mobile handset-makers that also have Qualcomm patent licenses, and those license agreements were anticompetitive and discouraged handset-makers from using technology from other companies, Broadcom alleged.

Qualcomm's actions violated the U.S. legal doctrine called patent exhaustion, which generally recognizes that downstream buyers of products containing patented technologies don't have to negotiate a separate license agreement with the original patent holder, Broadcom alleged.

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