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Where's the outcry about Samsung's conduct with respect to FRAND patents? | 481 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Where's the outcry about Samsung's conduct with respect to FRAND patents?
Authored by: Tkilgore on Tuesday, August 28 2012 @ 01:54 PM EDT
> That was a purely defensive move.

Not only that, but also:

FRAND does not mean "royalty free." It means something like
"Fair, Reasonable, and Non-discriminatory." Now, whether or not FRAND
is a good idea if standards are involved is one question. Most FOSS advocates
think it is not a good idea. But Samsung accused Apple of wanting to use the
patents, not on FRAND terms, but completely free of charge. That is, Apple
specifically refused to pay anything at all for the use of the Samsung patents
and claimed that because the patents were used for the implementation of
standards Apple has the perfect right to use them with no license agreement and
to pay nothing even if everyone else in the industry is licensing the patents
for some kind of standard fee. The obligation for FRAND licensing of
standard-related patents conveys no such right. Apple was refusing to pay
anything at all and saying, more or less, "Nya nya nya nya! So sue
us."

I was very disappointed that this did not come out more clearly in the trial.
One could see it if paying attention, but Samsung's lawyers should have made the
underlying facts crystal clear and obvious to everyone. Of course, they were
under severe time constraints. As a result, Samsung got a lot of unfair bad
press about alleged unfair use of standards-related patents, apparently for
demanding that one user of them has to license them on the same FRAND terms as
everybody else.

There is the separate issue, of course, that one of Apple's defenses to this
claim was that Intel had licensed the Samsung patents and Apple was covered by
patent exhaustion due to first sale. This defense may or may not have been valid
and applicable. Who knows? What is certainly obvious is that Samsung literally
did not have the time to present a single counterargument.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Where's the outcry about Samsung's conduct with respect to FRAND patents?
Authored by: SilverWave on Tuesday, August 28 2012 @ 03:15 PM EDT
“All's fair in love and war-what a contemptible lie!"
Lazarus Long, Robert Heinlein.

---
RMS: The 4 Freedoms
0 run the program for any purpose
1 study the source code and change it
2 make copies and distribute them
3 publish modified versions

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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