*Extra* The Easy-Come, Easy-Go Story of InterDigital

It's never good news when the only analyst following a supposedly hot company pulls the plug on its stock by discontinuing coverage. Such was the case today when Morgan Keegan's Ram Kasargod did just that with InterDigital Communications (IDC Quote), a stock he rates a hold. IDC's stock dove on the news and was lately down 9 3/4, or 17.7%, to 45 1/4.

The IDC story -- the one that caused the stock to zoom to a recent high of 82 (giving the company a market cap of around $4 billion) from 5 5/8 just two months ago -- is really very simple. To hear the bulls, IDC is a Qualcomm (QCOM Quote) wannabe. Thanks to a ruling by the U.S. Patent Office, IDC, the bulls say, has the rights to the technology used by all non-CDMA (code division multiple access, or CDMA, is the Qualcomm technology) cellular phones. (For a different twist on the story, see Marcy Burstiner's excellent article from a few weeks ago.) As the chief IDC bull on Internet message boards wrote, that means "2% or 3% of umpteen billions of dollars is . . . That's OURS!" ...