IMO, the reason that NEC was treated differently than the other companies is simply because there was already a license in place with other NEC entities from Feb pf 2007 that NEC paid $15.99M for. Only the NEC Electronics America entity was excluded from that original deal, so I'd guess that the origninal NEC license was appended to add the additional entity.

Similar to when Schnieder acquired APC. APC signed a new license but it was pretty small fee and happened because Schneider was already signed. The framework of the original agreement was probably adopted there and I'd suspect the same happened with NEC Elec. of America. Therefore, whatever the terms of the other companies' agreements were, NEC's would likely have been different and tied more to the original NEC license.

My point on the J3 deal is that PTSC has been VERY DELIBERATE to convey that what we see is what we get with the J3 deal. To have some other contingencies or if/then clause would essentially mean that they have misled the market intentionally.

From the other perspective, why would the J3 agree to settle only to be open to having to renegotiate a new license down the road. They spent considerable resources, and certainly seem to have ultimately been dealing from a position of relative strength based on the outcome. What would their incentive be to spend all those resources, just to negotiate an outcome that would be contingent on an completly unknown eventuality that would have to be revisited and renegoitated, and potentially re-litigated all over again.

What happens if the USPTO completely revalidates every aspect of the patents? What if they only revalidate 25% of them, 50%, 75%? What if 3 claims of one patent are thrown out, but 6 of another, and 2 of another, etc. My point is there is literally no way to have determined last December, what the likely outcomes would be on each patent, so to negotiate something that was temporary, only to be revisited upon completion of the USPTO action is to reopen Pandora's box. Not only that, but it is more than likely that one patent may be ruled on, while others continue in the reexam process, etc. Frankly, I can't see the J3 corps having ANY reason to agree to this, and if TPL/PTSC did, we should fire EVERYONE! IMO