Re: [rtcweb] Notification for draft-benham-rtcweb-vp8litigation-00.txt

["Timothy B. Terriberry" <[e-mail]>]

David Benham (dbenham) wrote:
>     There remains a great deal of confusion in the industry about the
>     state of patent litigation and IPR disclosures around VP8. To

Thanks for compiling this report, David. Hopefully this can avoid 
wasting time on arguments about what should be publicly documented 
facts. I just wanted to comment that your use of the acronym "FRAND" to 
mean "Free under Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory" terms may lead to 
some confusion, as there is already an existing expansion in common use, 
namely "Fair, Reasonable, And Non-Discriminatory". The term doesn't 
appear in the Duane Morris report you cite (except in a citation, where 
I believe it is intended to refer to the latter expansion, not the former).

I've been looking for a good term to use for technology which is covered 
by patents, but for which royalty-free licenses with open-source 
compatible terms exist. "Royalty-Free" doesn't quite fit the bill, as 
there are examples of royalty-free licenses which would preclude an 
open-source implementation [1]. "Patent-free" is clearly wrong and 
"patent-unencumbered", while better, might still be misleading (however, 
it's the best I've been able to think of).

If someone can think of a better way to describe this class of licenses, 
I am all ears. RFLWOSCT doesn't quite roll off the tongue.

[1] Clause 2.5 (among others) of 
http://www.polycom.com/content/dam/polycom/www/documents/program-details/siren-license-agreement.pdf 
being one example.