Nobody should ever own, or be able to take a
toll on _any_
"standard" because that becomes a fee penalty
structure to engage in normalcy.
A patent in a standard is
more or less a "poll tax" levied by a private party.
It's
all sorts of wrong.
What's a "standard"? In the case
of FRAND, I don't think
it means what you think it does. These are really
"defacto
standards", and not standards like how many inches in a foot
or how
many litres in a pint, or whatnot. Nor are they
standards like the line
frequency in the country you live in
(usually 50 Hz or 60 Hz).
In all
the decades I have watched computer technology
evolve, I have seen many new
technologies develop. Where
at first there was chaos with competing ways of
achieving
a desired end, finally industry standardizes on something
and
suddenly that technology moves forward and consumers
benefit from the end of
the initial chaos.
Really, it is marvelous to see competing companies
rise
above the fray to cooperate to their mutual benefit (and
often, ours as
well). This demonstrates evolution of
organizational behaviour. As the world
becomes ever more
complex, the only way we move forward is via evolutionary
leaps in organizational behaviour that may have been
unthinkable at some early
stage of development. The way
FRAND agreements evolved, as stated in the
article
demonstrates just such an evolutionary leap that permitted
us to
advance though cell phone generations at a rapid pace.
Now we have
companies like Apple and Microsoft coming
along and trying to throw a monkey
wrench in that machine.
If they are permitted to do that, it will all devolve
into
chaos. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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