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

["Mo Zanaty (mzanaty)" <[e-mail]>]

On 11/14/13, 5:56 PM, Ron <[e-mail]> wrote:
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.

No licensor / licensee in the MPEG LA pool can sue anyone over H.264.
Google is a licensee, so Motorola can no longer sue anyone over H.264.
Nokia (like the old Motorola) is neither a licensor nor licensee, so it
can sue.
But Nokia has FRAND obligations for H.264 since it participated in the
standard,
while it has no such obligations for VP8. If it sues over H.264, it likely
can’t get
more than half a cent like Motorola. If it sues over VP8, and wins, it can
get
a permanent injunction.

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

Half a cent is less of a problem than a permanent injunction.

> 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.

I never said it deserves credit, just that in one case it prevented
unreasonable royalties.

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

No FUD intended. If you want to help clear the FUD, help analyze the
patents.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130324162902177

I really hope we can do better than H.261. That would be a failure to me.

>  Ron