Standards bodies could (?) require working
group members to
agree to a royalty-free license to any
essential patents.
That is a very naive thing to say. "Standards bodies"
have no control over group members - it's the other way
around.
You
cannot force the kinds of standards we are talking on
anyone, at least not in
democratic countries. Let's imagine
for a moment, though, that somehow some
body formed that
tried to lay down some standards in the hopes that
manufacturers might conform to them. Who is going to develop
the technology
and give it away for free? The kind of
innovations that move us forward from
device generation to
generation didn't evolve out of a vacuum. It began as
innovation developed by companies often at great R&D expense
in order to
better compete in the market place. Why would
anyone expect these companies
just to hand over the tech
they developed to their competitors?
Now of
course the value of this technology increases with
network effect. For example,
if you come up with
fundamental, new tech that enables the next generation of
phones, you may come out at the top of the heap, or your
phones may be ignored
because their requirements are not
supported on the networks, which ended up
standardizing on
some cheaper solution, even if not as good.
FRAND, far
from being evil, was a very clever way to get
some cooperation among
competitors in a free market towards
the best technological solutions to common
problems. We are
far better off with FRAND than without. At least in
democratic societies with free markets, nobody has the right
to tell these
companies what they can do with their
technology. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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