Tesla, Intel, Ford and others waging a new war against Qualcomm over its patents

concertina226 writes: A group of carmakers and tech firms is urging US regulators to take further action against chipmaker Qualcomm over its sales practices.

Tesla, Ford, Honda, Daimler, Intel and MediaTek have asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to fight a recent court ruling in favour of Qualcomm.

Qualcomm has a practice of requiring customers to sign patent licence agreements before selling them chips.

Prof Mark Lemley of Stamford Law School thinks that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has misunderstood "the definition of antitrust law" in reversing the judgement against Qualcomm.

"It says for instance that it can ignore most of the district court findings because those findings show harm to downstream customers, and anti-trust law only concerns competitors," he explained.

"That's exactly backwards — for decades antitrust law has said we're not out to protect competitors, we're out to protect the competitive process and protect consumers."