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Andrew Tobias
Andrew Tobias

Money and Other Subjects

Parker And Patents

October 6, 2022October 5, 2022

Long-time readers will be familiar with the ParkerVision saga.  Some of you may own shares.  I own a zillion.

You may also recall that many years ago a jury awarded PRKR $174 million in its suit against Qualcomm, but that — far from awarding additional damages as punishment for “willfulness” (as, up to treble damages, he would have been allowed to do) — the  judge waited several months and then inexplicably (at least to our side) tossed the whole thing out.

Recently another judge — who we think will be overturned on appeal — refused to allow a second PRKR case against Qualcomm, involving different patents, even to reach a jury.

So apart from some small lawsuits, two big ones remain:

> This one, against Qualcomm, if the judge is overturned on appeal.

> A smaller but still large suit against Intel.

The Intel suit was recently delayed from December to February . . . but for a lovely reason.  Our lawyers, having lately become convinced that Intel willfully (i.e., knowingly) violated PRKR patents, petitioned the judge to allow them to add willfulness to PRKR’s claim.  The judge read their reasons and said okay, giving Intel that extra time to prepare its defense.

What were the lawyers’ reasons?  Against Intel’s wishes, they’ve just now been made public.

It’s dense going, but Paragraph 63 says that Intel was interested in purchasing patents from Skyworks, a multi-billion-dollar leader in the field of wireless technology, and that as part of their back and forth, Skyworks identified for Intel 74 ParkerVision patents as being the dominant patents in the field.

So PRKR held the dominant patents . . . as acknowledged by a leading, third-party authority . . . Intel knew this and profited magnificently from PRKRs inventions (or so PRKR claims) . . . yet PRKR was never paid a dime.

Might a jury decide in February that a great many dimes are due?

Might the judge decide the theft of intellectual property was willful, and double or triple the damages to send Big Tech a message?

Might a different judge eventually decide the same thing with respect to Qualcomm?

I have no clue, but a zillion reasons to hope so.

 

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