The alternative would be trying to file court cases outside the US for Qualcomm, which is where Huawei does most of its business and infringing.

There's a long history of various companies doing patent license deals like this in the telecom industry. Nokia still earns a lot of money this way, for example. Apple settled with them on a few occasions.

Speaking of which; Apple has its own 5G chips now so they are a bit less dependent on Qualcomm now. Huawei and Apple both have a lot of their own in house technology at this point. But of course Qualcomm always was a strong IP company with lots of patents and its impossible for either to make phones without infringing on at least some of those patterns. And vice versa, a lot of Qualcomm's stuff would necessarily infringe on some patents by others.

That's why these cross licensing deals like this are usually the outcome of disputes around IP.

They're not giving it away, rather they're essentially forming a patent oligopoly. Huawei and Qualcomm together hold the bulk of patents for 5G. It's of no value to them to try to litigate against each other. Here they're getting a cross-licensing deal that will solidify their patent licensing wall/revenues.

Is it potentially anticompetitive? Yes.

Huawei has been leading in 5G deployments until US decides him and his allies cannot be friends with Huawei.

Qualcomm will benefit greatly from this arrangement.

maybe 6g is on the way and they don't care about 5g anymore.

Nortel 2.0.

Canada remembers how fucked over we got in espionage.

Now Qualcomm’s just giving them it on a silver platter.

Big companies were sometimes getting sanction waivers. In energy, Exxon for example has been getting waivers to keep investing in Russian oil and gas since 2014. They got out in 2022 though, and the waivers stopped (I've no idea which ended first, the waivers or Exxon's interest in those projects).

With the current state of the U.S politics, nothing is sure.

They can just donate some crypto to one of the Trump kids to get it approved…

Binance has entered the chat.

Patents just embed western monopolies and cost everyone except the sovereign wealth funds and private equity that own everything in the west.

Someone has to tear it down, and it's not going to come from within. No balls on this side.

You know, at this scale law, is more like suggestion if benefits of not following it are better.

Apple ordered to pay $5.7bn after losing vibration tech patent suit (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6je85n2vyleo)

You can ask AI to summarise the list of when for example apple ignored patents. I get 16 cases.

What a strange sarcasm, nobody's forcing Qualcomm to do this.

QC will send them a sad emoji if their patents are violated in China.