Bluetooth and the vampire?

On 21 December 2006 the Washington Research Foundation (WRF), which manages the intellectual property of Washington State’s public universities, filed a lawsuit against three large electronic companies, which supply mobile handsets, Nokia, Samsung and Panasonic alleging infringement of four patents concerning Bluetooth technology.

On the face of it, such a lawsuit is not surprising: after all, Bluetooth is part of the mobile communications domain – and mobile communications has become the hot IP battlefield. On a second look, however, the case appears quite intriguing for at least two reasons:

• Bluetooth is generally thought of as a European technology, developed in the late 1990s, by a group of Scandinavian technology providers, including Eriksson and Nokia. Its name is taken from the 10th-century Danish King Harald Blatand – Harold Bluetooth in English.
• Bluetooth is a chip technology, and three handsets suppliers use a chip designed and produced by a UK company, CSR, which did not license the patents being litigated. Yet, CSR is not being sued.

Not surprisingly, most comments about the suit are less than complimentary. The validity of the WRF patents is being questioned (one of its patents was granted in October 2006, years after the widescale launch of the Bluetooth technology).

The choice of firms sued suggests that the WRF is interested primarily in deep pockets, rather than in the merits of its case. A UK journalist from The Register, a specialised publication that covers IT, asserts that the WRF is not just a patent troll, it is a patent “vampire”, scavenging second-rate IP from its members and then looking for soft-touch companies who would rather settle than litigate.

And yet the WRF is not a commercial firm  but a nonprofit organisation, acting on behalf of universities. One scenario, suggested sotto voice by CSR, is that Broadcom, a large and very litigious chip supplier, is behind the suit.

Broadcom recently licensed WRF patents. If handset producers are concerned about the risk of using litigious Bluetooth chips supplied by CSR in their US offerings , they may be tempted to switch to Broadcom. This may sound overly conspiratorial, but if we recall the antics of Rambus (see our blog of 25 August 2006) and other players in the industry, the idea may not be entirely fanciful.