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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, September 30 2012 @ 10:11 PM EDT |
It would be helpful if there were a Groklaw page with court hearing dates for
some of the cases we follow. I live in the Seattle area and would like to attend
a hearing or two for MS v Moto. I have to make plans a least two weeks in
advance but I usually catch the news the following day in the Seattle Times. I
looked at the district courts calendar but it only lists cases for the upcoming
week.
stage_v
from under the bridge [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, October 01 2012 @ 02:10 AM EDT |
> Is there something I have missed?
Yes, the H264 and 802.11* patent pool license agreements.
I missed them too, because AFAICT you need to be a member to
know what they're all about. It seems from my reading between
the lines of the US court papers, that the two consortia can grant
world-wide licenses covering the patents held by pool members in
countries which may be listed in the documents. Nothing wrong
with that, since the pool members are supposed to have put all
their patents from all countries into the pool.
MS moved first, asking the Washington court if Motorola's price
was FRAND. This must have come about since MS' contribution
to the pool was less than Motorola's. Moto counterclaimed,
then got tired of the foot dragging and sued in Germany.
The US court is saying that the German move jumped the gun,
short circuited process, and the US court couldn't allow that
to happen.
The German court as you observe will ignore third party agreements
when applying German law to German litigation. Now that
Motorola have an injunction against MS in Germany we can
wait to see if Moto attempt to enforce it. If they do they will
be in contempt of the US court, the local case will go to MS
and we will fall back to country by country negotiations.
* It seems the 802.11 pool is still in formation stage, so
things may not be so clear cut there...[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, October 01 2012 @ 04:55 AM EDT |
If you read the ruling, they are not claiming jurisdiction
over the German patent case, they are claiming jurisdiction
over a contract between two US companies, and that the
outcome of that contractual dispute will be dispositive of
the German patent ruling. Basically a sloppy letter from
Motorola to Microsoft has created a contract which trumps the
German patent ruling.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, October 01 2012 @ 10:32 AM EDT |
As with all UN subsidiaries, the ISO and ITU do not have corporations as
members, but the individual countries are the actual members. However, all of
the work in is done by experts, in the ITU it's the carriers and the carriers'
suppliers, and in ISO, its the manufacturers and users. Once they agree on
something, the nominal country representatives (in a large boondoggle) meet and
approve all the work that someone else did, as we remember with the XML
disputes.
Because of this, this lawsuit is not a dispute between standard body members,
but between companies which have provided input to standards. I expect this is
one of the reasons the standard bodies don't get involved with the actual
inter-party disputes.
If every party had a fixed price for all of their patents, and everyone paid
that price, these disputes would be much easier. However, since most parties
have their own patent pools, some RAND, and some non-RAND, they prefer to have
cross-licensing agreements, which frees their employees from having to worry
about infringing on that party's patents, or from having to license every patent
every time. The different payment rates for different parties licensing the
patents usually result from some value associated with cross-licensing. This
makes it nearly impossible to determine if rates are really non-discriminatory,
as there are no straight licensing deals. So, Microsoft sees the price
associated with other deals (which likely includes cross licensing), and wants
that lower price without cross-licensing. In the meantime, Motorola would much
prefer to have a cross license so it can avoid Microsoft's "Android"
tax. But, this will mix RAND and non-RAND. Being owned by Google now could
complicates things, if there is some desire to cross-license the Google crown
jewel search patents.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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- Jurisdiction? - Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, October 01 2012 @ 12:52 PM EDT
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