It's a far cry from the $1.2 billion number that was bandied about at one point, but it looks like Sprint could still be taking a fairly sizable hit over those pesky early termination fees, at least if a proposed class action settlement plays out as it seems likely too. As Sprint itself announced today, the company's reached a $14 million settlement in the case, which will be placed in a common fund to be distributed accordingly to all the parties involved, which is where you come in (assuming you're a current of former Sprint, Nextel, or Sprint Nextel customer, that is). The short of it is that you can either sign on to the class action suit or opt out of it by hitting up the site linked below, and then you'll have to wait for the final approval hearing now scheduled for October 21st, which should actually settle the settlement once and for all. Details on the exact payout amounts to customers are buried in the documents on the settlement website, but it looks like the majority of customers will be receiving between $25 and $90 depending on their contract, plus some free bonus minutes.

Read - Sprint ETF Settlement website
Read - Sprint statement

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Research in Motion hit a milestone today, only "achievement" wouldn't necessarily be the best way to describe it. The BlackBerry maker has finally ended a long-running patent dispute with Visto Corp., paying out $267.5 million to settle the matter -- a much larger fee than the $7.7 million Visto got from Seven Networks, but conversely a fraction of the reported $612.5 million RIM paid to settle with NTP years back. With it, however, comes a fully paid license to use Visto's patents, and some of the plaintiff's intellectual property by way of transferred ownership. So now that we can move on from that dispute, who's next to take the mantle and vie for a piece of BlackBerry's pie?

Truthfully, we're having a hard time coming to grips with this. For as long as we wished that these two would stop bickering, it's actually tough to swallow the fact that we'll never again be able to write about "yet another lawsuit" between Qualcomm and Broadcom (in theory, anyway). After nearly three full years of fighting with pencils, papers and soulless words, the courtroom throwdowns are finally ceasing. In a shocking development, the two rivals have entered into a settlement and multi-year patent agreement that will "result in the dismissal with prejudice of all litigation between the companies, including all patent infringement claims in the International Trade Commission and US District Court in Santa Ana, as well as the withdrawal by Broadcom of its complaints to the European Commission and the Korea Fair Trade Commission." The exact terms of the deal are posted after the break, though you should know that Qualcomm will have to shell out $891 million in cash (ouch!) over the next four years. The lawyers may be out of work, but you can rest assured that there's no shortage of abhorrence between these frenemies.

"Settlement" and "needy schools" aren't two things that most companies would like to see in a press release, but that's exactly what AT&T is dealing with at the moment after it has paid out $8.2 million to settle a dispute involving the E-Rate program, which uses funds collected from phone customers to pay for hardware and connectivity service fees for schools and libraries. According to the Department of Justice, AT&T (or, more specifically, AT&T Technical Services Corp.) allegedly not only engaged in non-competitive bidding practices for E-Rate contracts, but claimed and received E-rate funds for goods and services that weren't eligible for the program, and over-billed the E-Rate program for some of the services it provided. This resolution is also apparently specifically a result of a federal investigation into fraud and anti-competitive conduct in the E-Rate program in Indiana which, it seems, is still ongoing.

At last, it's over. InterDigital, which is best known for its episodes in the courtroom with Samsung and Nokia, has finally reached an agreement with the former firm. The two have been at each other's throats since April of last year regarding patents allegedly used in some of Sammy's more sophisticated phones. The decision was reached just a day before the US International Trade Commission was set to rule on whether to recommend barring affected Samsung imports altogether, which we can assure you was not at all coincidental. There's been no public disclosure of settlement value, though one analyst at Hilliard Lyons estimates that Samsung will be coughing up $400 to $500 million over the next five years to make this problem go away. Talk about a recurring nightmare.

Not that we haven't seen victories over SMS spammers before, but this one is sure catching a lot of attention due to the names attached. GSI Commerce and Timberland have reportedly agreed to "establish a fund of up to $7 million to settle a class-action lawsuit brought against them for allegedly sending unsolicited text messages to wireless telephone users in violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act." The settlement has already received preliminary approval from a judge in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois Eastern Division, and while the aforementioned firms vehemently deny any wrongdoing, they concede that taking this to court would be "burdensome, protracted and expensive." More expensive than $7 million? Is that guilt we smell, or what?

[Via mocoNews]

One of the longest-running -- and certainly most fascinating -- soap operas in the entire wireless world, the seemingly endless patent drama between Nokia and Qualcomm, has finally drawn to an amicable (dare we say anti-climactic) close. After just a single day of arbitration, the two firms have basically agreed to a patent swap, allowing Nokia to use all of Qualcomm's patents and vice versa. Furthermore, Nokia is just stone-cold handing over a bunch of patents it holds related to GSM, WCDMA, and OFDMA, which presumably means companies that are currently licensing those patents can get ready to start writing those checks to Qualcomm. What's more, Espoo's dropping its anti-competition claims against Qualcomm in Europe -- but beyond that, specific terms (read: cash money) weren't disclosed beyond the typical PR pleasantries that both sides are happy with the outcome. If this means we finally have to retire our Nokia-Qualcomm starburst graphic, we're going to pout like little children, so we can only hope these two lovebirds find something else to squabble over in the not-too-distant future.

It's a far cry from the $1 billion potential pay-out we heard about initially, but it looks like Verizon will still be forking over a hefty chunk of cash as a result of that class action lawsuit over early termination fees -- $21 million, to be exact. Verizon still isn't about to admit to any wrong doing, however, with its spokesman saying simply that the suit "was a distraction," and that "this was a quick way to resolve it." As Dow Jones points out, the resolution of suits like these could well put a renewed focus on FCC Chairman Kevin Martin's efforts to curtail carriers' ability to charge ETF fees, which he hopes will eventually be governed by some national rules.

[Via Phone Scoop]

Only in the world of corporate law could two entities make amends in one continent while beating each other to a legal pulp in another. After three years of trading lawsuits over a handful of InterDigital patents regarding their applicability to the UMTS standard, Nokia and the firm have agreed to bury the hatchet with a settlement whose terms are undisclosed -- but only in the UK. The battle goes on in the US, where InterDigital still wants the ITC to put the smack down on Nokia's 3G products, which it claims are in violation of its intellectual property. InterDigital's stock got a nice little boost from the ordeal in the Isles, so it's apparently a Good Thing; maybe these guys want to take a seat at the negotiating table stateside, too?

[Via Phone Scoop]

For most, the Treo 600 and 650 are old enough so that we don't really remember if we had troubles with 'em or not -- but apparently we did, and some owners are now entitled to a little chunk of cash to show for it. A class action lawsuit filed against Palm "claimed that the Treo 600 and Treo 650 smartphones had certain defects, failed at unacceptable rates, and that Palm made misrepresentations concerning the Treo 600 and Treo 650 smartphones," and Palm just decided to settle the whole tiff rather than take it to trial. This means that if you owned a Treo 600 or 650 that required two or more repairs and ended up purchasing a new device within a certain period, you get a little spending money -- or you're entitled to some free repair work, even if your Treo didn't require two or more trips to the shop. Naturally, there are some rules and regs involved -- this is a legal matter, after all -- so head on over to the site to figure out whether you're affected and how you can cash in.

[Thanks, Michael G.]

And by "make nice" we mean they probably exchanged large amounts of money behind closed doors to keep this lawsuit from getting out of hand. RIM's lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for Central California in December, alleges that not only does Samsung's BlackJack phone cause consumer confusion, but the very fact that Samsung called the phone i600 in Europe proves that it was specifically targeting the US-centric BlackBerry types. RIM, in a statement Wednesday said that the settlement includes "immediate provisions for the protection of RIM's valuable trademarks," and that it "does include limitations on use of the Blackjack trademark, withdrawal of the trademark application for Blackjack, Cingular's retention of common law rights in the Blackjack trademark, and certain reasonable measures to avoid confusion in the marketplace." So it sounds like Samsung won't be getting much more mileage out of this naming convention, though the deliberate "Blackjack" misspelling by RIM -- with that lowercase "j" -- has to grate on Sammy just a little bit, unless of course that was part of the deal. So, can we all just get along now?

[Thanks, Marty H]