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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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Dissolving FRAND agreement? | 429 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Dissolving FRAND agreement?
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, January 09 2013 @ 03:21 PM EST
It's been... interesting.... reading the rather
idiosyncratic take on the law here.


As to your question, companies will contribute for the same
reason they always have. For the standard (and/or a steady
stream of profits). This is what marks the main difference
between SEPs and non-SEPs.

Think of it in terms of real property. Imagine you have two
landowners. Blackacre and Whiteacre. B has a cool stream
that he wants people to see, but so do all the other
landowners in his property. So they all get together and
appeal to the county and make a deal- B becomes the "county
river" so long as B lets all the tourists that want to view
his river on to the property for a low, non-discriminatory
rate.

On the other, W has a cave. W thinks his cave is the bestest
cave ever. W will only let you come to his property and see
his cave if you make a deal with him and pay him what W
demands.

It's a little like that. Almost always, there's a number of
ways to implement a given standard, and companies are
competing to have the SEP (look at Apple v. Nokia nano-sim
war). One wins. The "cost" of winning is that you have an
encumbered patent. The benefit is that it is a standard, and
that others will use it (which should lead to increased use,
and increased revenue, even though the revenue is less).

The problem in the recent litigation is that it is alleged
that some parties, when sued by regular patent holders,
tried to extract hold-up value from their SEPS, which is
certainly discriminatory (and arguably not reasonable). As
Posner correctly reasoned, the whole point of SEPs would be
turned on their head if litigants could successfully assert
a higher hold up value due to their value qua standards.

But, the above analysis certainly had a lot of words.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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