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| Authored by: Ian Al on Friday, January 04 2013 @ 05:27 AM EST |
The essential patents for world standards are those seen as essential for the
implementation of the standard, by the expert technologists creating the
standard.
If a patent pool trawls patent owners for 'essential patents' what are they
essential for? They are not essential for implementing world standards because
those patents have already been given a FRAND declaration by the owners.
When a patent pool trawls patent owners for 'essential patents' for the existing
H264 ITU standard which already has FRAND declarations for all the technically
necessary patents and the patent pool has to assess what licensing charges they
are going to make for the pool (i.e. not FRAND, but what they can extort) they
can only be essential for attacking implementers of H264.
Patent pools can be a resource for good. However, patent pools that canvas for
essential patents and quote the target technology are universally patent
misusers. For instance, MPEG LA declared that they were targeting both the ITU's
H264 and Google's open and free video codec standard. How can setting commercial
patent royalty rates for an open and free standard be anything other than patent
misuse?
If you can quote a patent pool that canvassed for 'essential patents' that were
not set a market price and were not targeting a technology standard that already
had FRAND declarations, I might change my mind.
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Regards
Ian Al
Software Patents: It's the disclosed functions in the patent, stupid![ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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