Qualcomm has taken a beating in the courtroom in recent years through its patent disputes with Irvine, CA-based Broadcom. So the San Diego wireless giant (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]) was no doubt relieved when a San Diego federal judge dismissed three class-action consumer complaints against the company yesterday.
U.S. District Court Judge William Q. Hayes granted Qualcomm’s request to dismiss the consolidated consumer cases. In one case, Oakland, CA, resident Jesse Meyer, who bought a Motorola Razr cell phone in 2007 through AT&T/Cingular, argued he was harmed by Qualcomm’s “anti-competitive technology licensing practices.” Qualcomm announced the ruling today.
In a ruling that closed all three cases, Hayes said the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring antitrust claims, because the injuries they alleged were too remote to be traced to allegedly anticompetitive conduct by Qualcomm. The judge also ruled that other allegations raised in the suits did not give the plaintiffs any right to compensation from Qualcomm under California’s unfair competition law.
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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