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EU pushes for openness on patent royalties
,----[ Quote ]
| Uncertainty over royalty payments is a
| bugbear of the wireless industry, as seen
| by the current nervousness over the IPR
| burden that will materialize in LTE
| devices. Once standards are set and start
| to appear in commercial products, patent
| holders often emerge from the woodwork to
| claim their fee, leading to complex cross-
| licensing negotiations and sometimes
| lawsuits and hefty royalty fees.
|
| Many bodies, particularly the European
| standards agency ETSI, have been trying to
| get patent holders to declare their
| holdings in a would-be standard upfront,
| and the European Union is now offering a
| powerful incentive to turn this into best
| practise. The EU says companies that
| provide technology that could be adopted in
| industry standards could be exempted from
| strict European antitrust laws if they set
| out, from the start, the maximum fees they
| would charge for their patents.
|
| [...]
|
| According to the Reuters news agency, the
| draft rules contain benchmarks to assess
| the level of FRAND licensing fees. The
| Commission said companies would need to
| disclose their intellectual property rights
| before their patents were included in
| standards. "No or unclear disclosure
| obligations may furthermore give incentives
| to 'patent ambushes', that is companies
| hiding patents until industry is locked in
| and thereafter refusing to license or
| request exorbitant fees," the statement
| said.
`----
http://www.rethink-wireless.com/2010/05/06/eu-pushes-openness-patent-royalties.htm
KnowRiÂht conference speech on software patents, standards and competition
http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2010/05/knowriht-conference-speech-on-software.html
New federal Pirate Party wants to storm Parliament
,----[ Quote ]
| The Pirate Party wants to change copyright
| law, giving artists more liberty to build
| on previous works and choose distribution
| and licensing models allowing them to make
| a living, and to help educate music artists
| about earning through means other than
| selling recordings through large corporate
| intermediaries. It pledges to evaluate
| introduction of levies to further
| compensate artists, but in turn, would make
| private, non-commercial copying of content
| legal and virtually unrestricted for
| consumers. Noting that current legislation
| grants patent owners 20-year monopoly
| rights, and contending that especially in
| the fast-moving software industry where
| inventions virtually always build on
| previous works, issuing patents on software
| consequently exposes innovators to lawsuit
| risk, chilling innovation, the party would
| ban software patents to encourage
| innovators to enter the market without fear
| of being sued.
`----
http://telegraphjournal.canadaeast.com/opinion/article/1042718
Recent:
Don't be fooled again
,----[ Quote ]
| Glynn Moody writes an insightful analysis of Microsoft's latest attempt to
| confuse the issue of open standards by throwing a new word into the mix:
| balance. It didn't fool Glynn, and it shouldn't fool you, either.
|
| In the final analysis, the question of what is an open standard, and how
| governments and free markets should police the claims of those who purport to
| offer open standards should never come down to a question of rhetoric. An
| open standard should never depend on what the definition of "is" is. Rather,
| there is plenty of room for those who are honest to say "X is a proprietary
| standard, dependent on restrictive technologies that must be licensed for a
| fee" and for others who are equally honest when they say "Y is an open
| standard, dependent on a variety of technologies, all of which can be
| practiced royalty free". And if we believe that free markets can make
| intelligent decisions based on fair information, market participants can
| choose which offering is most attractive to them and the best will come to
| all.
`----
http://www.opensource.org/node/458
Wigital: Interoperability - Open Source, Sun Java, Novell Linux and Microsoft
,----[ Quote ]
| Microsoft patenst in these protocols will be made available on RAND terms at
| very low royalty rates Covenant not to sue open source developers for
| development and non-commercial distribution of implementations of these Open
| Protocols.
`----
http://www.digitalmajority.org/forum/t-67212/wigital:interoperability-open-source-sun-java-novell-linux-and-microsoft
2008-04-02 Royalty Free versus Reasonable and Non Discriminatory Licensing
,----[ Quote ]
| Now, here an example of a RAND (Reasonable And Non Discriminatory) licensing
| model, this one has been made by Cisco about VRRP :
|
| Cisco is the owner of US patent No. 5 473 599, relating to the subject matter
| of "Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol for IPv6
| <draft-ietf-vrrp-ipv6-spec-04.txt>. If technology in this document is
| included in a standard adopted by IETF and any claims of this or any other
| Cisco patent are necessary for practicing the standard, any party will be
| able to obtain a license from Cisco to use any such patent claims under
| reasonable, non-discriminatory terms to implement and fully comply with the
| standard.
|
| First you need to contact Cisco to have a license but the terms are
| unknown. "Non-discriminatory" is vague and could be an issue for any free
| software implementation.
`----
http://www.foo.be/cgi-bin/wiki.pl/2008-04-02_Royalty_Free_versus_Reasonable_and_Non_Discriminatory_Licensing
Rambus Court: âPrice Raising Deceptionâ Not Competitive Harm
,----[ Quote ]
| By the time Rambus announced its patents and began demanding royalties (and
| filing patent infringement suits against companies that refused to pay
| royalties), Rambus had achieved a technical âlock-inâ that made it difficult
| for the memory chip industry to move to a different technology. Rambusâs
| lock-in allowed it to obtain a 90% market-share, and demand supracompetitive
| royalties from companies that were producing JEDEC-compliant memory devices.
| Rambus has earned several billion dollars in licensing fees to date, and by
| some estimates its total royalties are could reach as high as $11 billion.
`----
http://www.masslawblog.com/?p=179
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