My mom worked at Nortel in the 1990s at their Ottawa R&D campus. As a teenager visiting, I asked about corporate espionage, hoping for a story about Cisco or something. Every one of her co-workers just belted out "China" at the same time. It was apparently an open secret that the Chinese were hoovering up IP and management didn't care. It's a bit of a shame as Nortel's telecom kit was considered top-notch (especially the cellular stuff), but it gave the Chinese an enormous amount of help catching up.
replyThat being said, the Chinese then went off and innovated off of it and Nortel imploded, mostly due to other poor management reasons. My mom was at least smart enough to cash out most of her equity as she got them, though. Lotta people lost everything.
That was two decades ago. Things have changed a lot since then.
replyThe patents they built today are founded on the patents they derived stealing from nortel. Qualcomm needs these whitewashed patents as part of this frand deal.
replyNortel's patents were among the first that were critical to modern MIMO OFDM (they really were on to the future in that sense, it's not hyperbole), but most never went to Qualcomm or Huawei. When Nortel went belly-up a consortium called Rockstar co-owned by Microsoft, RIM and a few others ended up buying them for a hefty price (more than $4 billion). It's possible some of them have made their way over to Qualcomm or Huawei as part of sales over the years I guess.
replyIt's become more widespread.
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