It wouldn't impact Apple because Apple isn't acquiring Nuvia.

The article doesn't do a good job of talking about the case. I will try to summarize what is at issue (IANAL nor an expert on this case). I'm going to start by telling ARM's side of the story (since they're the ones suing).

Nuvia got a license from ARM. Part of that license was a requirement that any transfer of Nuvia's tech developed under these licenses required ARM approval. Nuvia agreed to this, presumably to get more favorable rates. Qualcomm bought Nuvia to jumpstart their custom-core business. ARM didn't consent to the transfer. Therefore, Qualcomm must destroy the Nuvia tech or reach an agreement with ARM.

Why would ARM want to do this? Let's say you're ARM. You're the king of mobile, but you have very little presence in the datacenter. Nuvia comes along and says, "we think ARM can conquer the datacenter." Awesome, you now have a company that will start rolling some sweet datacenter money your way. But what if Nuvia is just a trojan horse? What if they're just a smokescreen to create some custom cores and then have one of the companies that licenses your cores switch to only licensing your architecture? That would be terrible for your revenue. That's not Nuvia's strategy: they genuinely want to do their stated mission. Nuvia and ARM agree that ARM will have veto power over transfer of their IP. Fast forward a few years and it turns out that chip startups are hard and Qualcomm has lots of cash and the potential to bring your dreams to life - and more. Qualcomm's lawyers believe they will be able to get around the agreement - they've been able to bead back FRAND patent claims for decades, even against Apple.

Why would Nuvia agree to this? Possibly because they had no other choice. If ARM won't give you an architecture license without this, you have to agree to it. Or maybe it was a way of getting a lot of cost savings. Or maybe ARM would give you the kind of support and service that would cut years off the development of your custom cores because ARM felt safe knowing that you couldn't just sell that on to Qualcomm or MediaTek.

Ultimately, this doesn't impact Apple because Apple isn't buying Nuvia.

ARM says, "The licenses safeguarded Arm's rights and expectations by prohibiting assignment without Arm's consent, regardless of whether a contemplated assignee had its own Arm licenses."

For ARM, the potential issue here is that Qualcomm (one of their largest licensees) stops buying ARM-designed cores because they have their own designs. That is fair insofar as Qualcomm has an architecture license. However, it isn't fair if they do that by buying a company that explicitly agreed that their tech wouldn't be transferred without ARM's consent.

Let's say that ARM licensed Nuvia and the restriction was explicit: you can never sell your company to Qualcomm. Then they sell the company to Qualcomm. Not allowed, right? In this case, Qualcomm is arguing that Qualcomm has its own architecture license so it should be allowed to use its architecture license with Nuvia's designs.

ARM's complaint: https://regmedia.co.uk/2022/08/31/pacer_arm_qualcomm.pdf

Now, I don't have access to the Nuvia/ARM contract so I can't really say if ARM's complaint is valid. Did Nuvia's license require the destruction of any technology created under such license when the license terminates as ARM alleges?

Qualcomm says that the requirement to destroy information only applies to ARM-provided information and not anything developed under the license.

https://regmedia.co.uk/2022/11/01/pacer_qualcomm_arm_filing....

It's really hard to tell without actually having access to the license agreements who is right. Qualcomm's filing seems to fall back on the idea that it would be ridiculous to give ARM this kind of power over what Nuvia had created. However, companies seem to make these types of agreements all the time. ARM wanted to give Nuvia an opportunity to succeed, but also wanted to prevent Nuvia from just selling itself to Qualcomm, MediaTek, etc. So it inserted a clause to prevent that without ARM's agreement. Nuvia could be an independent company and sell all its chips and become the next big chip designer. If they wanted to be bought by Qualcomm or someone, they could negotiate with ARM for ARM's consent.

To me, this op-ed reads like Qualcomm propaganda. To me, it sounds like ARM has Qualcomm dead-to-rights and Qualcomm is trying to allege something unrelated to the case: that ARM wants to cease its architecture licenses because it sees that companies will be able to stop paying them for ARM-designed cores. That would certainly be problematic, but many ARM licensees have perpetual architecture licenses (like Apple and presumably Qualcomm as well) so it wouldn't actually impact them if ARM pivoted their business model in this way. It's also just speculation on ARM's future business model.

I definitely understand the position of those who would hate ARM in this case. ARM isn't an open-source company. They're open...to companies paying them royalties. ARM wants to protect their current revenue while also being open enough that they can enter new markets - like the datacenter. That's a hard line to balance, but it sounds like they tried to do that with Nuvia: giving them a license on good terms in exchange for a guarantee that they weren't just a trojan horse to undercut revenue from Qualcomm, MediaTek, or others.

I'm not trying to argue that's good for consumers or the market in general. As a consumer, if we eliminated all existing patents while pinky-swearing "we won't do that again" it would mean we'd continue to get all the future benefits of patents (since inventors would feel safe that their future inventions would get paid back) while not suffering the monopoly of current patents (since once the invention has been made, we no longer need to incentivize that invention). Likewise, if we just eliminated ARM's IP, it would be great - as long as we didn't make other companies worry that we'd be eliminating their IP as well. While we're eliminating IP, eliminating Qualcomm's patents might have some of the biggest impact - Qualcomm literally wants more royalties from a device if it includes a better screen or camera despite using the same LTE/5G.

I'd love to actually see the architecture license with Nuvia, but instead I guess I'll just read the sniping that Qualcomm and ARM make in their filings.