Just as it appeared the warring factions in the long-running Qualcomm v. Broadcom battle may have been winding down their disagreements to a precious few, a jury in Santa Ana ruled this afternoon that among the few remaining items of dispute between them, Qualcomm did indeed willfully infringe upon three of four.

But the "willfulness" portion of the jury's ruling was important, because it enables a federal judge under current US patent law to impose treble damages: up to three times the ascertained value of the infringing technology's impact on the market, which is the $19.64 million number. Thus US District Judge James Selna is within his rights to triple the damages to just under $59 million.

And Judge Selna could also issue an injunction against the importation into the US of any cell phone that contains Qualcomm chipsets whose technology was found to have infringed upon Broadcom's portfolio - which could be a huge chunk of Qualcomm's product line.

If that happens, the effects on the cell phone market here could be immediate and deep. Handsets that use Qualcomm's chipsets for multimode broadband to include EV-DO, "push-to-talk" capability as made popular stateside by Nextel, and video phones that use multiple processors as subordinates to the DSP for signal compression and decompression, may be immediately affected.

Qualcomm's only remedy at this point may be to file an appeal - which its attorneys today indicated they will likely do - and then to have any injunction Judge Selna may issue stayed pending the outcome of that appeal. Perhaps by that time, the company will have developed workarounds for the infringing methods.

Meanwhile, the US International Trade Commission could rule as soon as next week as to whether to ban the importation into the US of cell phones that include Qualcomm chipsets whose technology was found last October to violate a fourth Broadcom patent. The ITC may have been awaiting the outcome of the Santa Ana trial, in order not to taint the outcome there. But with Qualcomm now having been branded by a federal jury, that ban now seems likely.

Qualcomm is, of course, completely innocent, according to its executive vice president and general counsel, Lou Lupin: "We continue to believe that none of the Broadcom patent claims are valid or were infringed by Qualcomm," he stated this afternoon, "and we will challenge the jury's findings of infringement, validity and willfulness in post-trial motions and on appeal if necessary."