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| Authored by: calris74 on Monday, October 22 2012 @ 06:09 PM EDT |
What I don't get is, why aren't the patent royalties
processed through the standards setting body?
If you plan on implementing a standard, you typically need
to join the standards setting body and quite often also pay
for the documentation for the standard you wish to
implement. Then there are fees for testing your compliance
with the standard and even yearly subscription fees to
continue using the standard.
So why don't the standards bodies negotiate with the patent
holders the royalty rates and integrate those rates into the
fees? Those fees could even be per-unit royalties. For the
patent holders, it becomes a 'set-and-forget' revenue
stream. No need to re-negotiate royalties with every man and
his dog.
But patent holders are greedy animals - They like to wait
until the standard becomes really popular by charging low or
zero royalties initially. Then they start to play hardball.
What was a dollar per chip is now 2.5% of the sale price of
the entire integrated product. Solution - The standards
setting body renegotiates every year.
The problem then becomes, what to do about patent holders
who do not participate in the development of a standard
which infringes on their patents? Of course, they will go
after the individual implementer. Now you could pass laws
which forces any such action to be diverted to the standards
body - It would be the responsibility of the standards body
to properly research the potentially infringing patent pool
and either:
a) Avoid the patent(s) in the standard
b) Negotiate with the patent holder
c) Ignore the patent, indemnify standards users, and cop
the resulting lawsuit(s) on the chin
And where does that leave FLOSS? Not any worse of than it
currently is. And if the standard is wholly implemented in
hardware, then FLOSS is not impacted as you pay for the
license by buying the hardware. It's when the standard is
purely software (say TCP/IP for example) or requires a
software component (in the device driver) where we have a
problem. The solution is (obviously) to eliminate software
patents.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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