An interesting and well thought out comment by another shareholder ChaunceyKincaidIII....

Looking back a few years at the WIN versus Intel et al case for laptops and routers, Intel was the first to settle, roughly 2-3 weeks before trial was to begin.

SpinnToWin's Note inserted here:Technically speaking LG was the first to settle on Dec 23 2010. INTEL actually settled 14-JAN-2011 which then broke the logjam leading to the rest of the chip vendors throwing in the towel.The only concern to the so called 90% rule and settlements prior to trial, is that Wi-LAN appears to be asking for higer rates that in the past. This could be somewhat of a barrier, and who knows, may lead to an actual trial commencing.

It appears from the court documents posted recently that the defendants in the Alcatel et al 3GPP case, which goes to trial the first of April, are doing whatever they can to delay and obfuscate the proceedings. Also that one of the main issues of contention is royalties. Past due amounts and future royalty rates. So it would seem logical that with roughly 9 weeks to trial, the parties are deep in negotiation over settlement amounts.

Personally I will go with the rule that 90% of patent litigations are settled before trial and the 100% rule that Skippen, in all his years, has never taken a litigation to trial.

If the Intel case is used as precedent, then one could assume that settlements in the Alcatel et al case will begin to be announced sometime in mid-March.

The interesting sidebar is that one of the defendants is HTC who is also a defendent in other litigations with WIN. Skippen commented in one of the recent conference calls that if a defendant were in multiple litigations that they would probably want to settle all at the same time.

HTC's settlement nut, so to speak, for all current litigations is going to be big. So assuming they settle in March on all litigations that then would end their involvment in the Apple et al handset case. So the question is, what will Apple and the other defendants in that case do if HTC settles? Would not that signifiganty damage their continued defence. It seems to me it would and might, just might push those defendants to settle as well.

So you see the Alcatel case is not only important in and of itself, it will probably impact all other cases on the docket.

I believe the market is not factoring this potential domino effect into the current stock price. But when it does, the stock price is going to move up suddenly and sharply, and this could happen at anytime.

I am not a big believer in manipulation of the stock price, nor that a takeover is inevitable. The stock has been trading on relatively low volume for many months now so small blocks and retail investors tend to influence the price. There is vitually no short position in WIN and given over 120 million shares outstanding that tells me there is no one betting that the stock is going down from current levels and those that own are holding. And as for a takeover, it may happen and it may not, but it is not a sufficient reason to invest, as you would maybe place a 50%-50% probablity of it happening. Not really great odds if you ask me.

What I do believe however, is that the probablity of settlements in the next 6-7 weeks is very high and I will go with a 90-100% probablity of this happenig all day long. Once the domino effect occurs, I believe that we are talking about $100's of millions of dollars in settlements being booked in 2013.

It will be interesting to see just how high this stock goes by year end.