Published: 5/5/15
Publication: ZDNet
South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission (FTC) has internally deemed Qualcomm’s patent licensing practices for smartphone-making clients and chip competitors to be an abuse of standard essential patents (SEP), an abuse of its dominant position, and against fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms, people with knowledge of the matter told ZDNet Korea. SEP refers to patents that are needed for companies to do business in a certain industry, with the holder required to license them to the licensee under FRAND terms. The FTC launched the investigation on April 28, 2014, and sent out a request for information (RFI) to Qualcomm sometime in August last year, sources said. The regulator then sent out RFIs to handset manufacturers and chipset makers, clients, and competitors of Qualcomm that are either based in or have regional offices in South Korea on March 5 this year, and received replies from all of them by March 13.