Re: [rtcweb] ~"I'd love it if patents evaporated...If not now, when"

[Ron <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 10:16:20PM +0000, Mo Zanaty (mzanaty) wrote:
> You don¹t have to speculate. Motorola (now Google) sued Microsoft over
> H.264 patents. No one intervened, so there is no obligation nor incentive
> to do so. However, because this involved standards-essential patents, and
> Motorola participated in the standards, it has FRAND obligations for those
> SEPs, with a clear precedent for FRAND royalty rates established by MPEG
> LA for that standard. The result was Microsoft has to pay half a cent in
> royalties per product they ship containing an H.264 codec, but Motorola
> must pay $15M for breaching SEP/FRAND obligations (by demanding $4B). If
> Nokia sued anyone over H.264, a similar result is likely.

Except the proposed Cisco binary deal isn't licencing the Nokia patents,
or the Motorola patents, or any others, so they'd all still be free to
sue anyone using that.

How is this known and proven liability somehow less of a problem than the
absence of any such thing overshadowing VP8?

If we're giving credit to MPEG LA, we can also credit them for trying very
hard, and failing, to create a pool that reads on VP8.


If people are going to stand on that FUD, maybe a 25 year old codec is
the best answer here after all.

  Ron