ChiefNode

When do standards' organizations obligations end?

AT&T has approached several companes, claiming that they violate the MPEG-4 standard, and offering to license rights to them on RAND (reasonable and non-discriminatory) terms. MPEG-4 has described their responsibilities to include patents which are "essential" to the standard in the patent pool, but acknowledge that other patents may speak to the standard. The .gif disaster is ?over? or almost over? so why is AT&T bringing this up now? A company decides to not join, that is painful to all standards' efforts. A company is refused, now that makes sense. And when does MPEG-4 have responsiblity to the users to collect rights "necessary" or fight, on behalf of the standards users, for "quiet" use of the rights?

Interesting that on the same day, Microsoft announces that they will foot the legal bills (all the legal bills in infringement cases is the key phrase) for IP infringement when redistributors/ integrators adopt MS products. Some would argue that Microsoft's operating system is the de facto standard on computers (of many types) and this is a mechanism to protect its users from adopting its product. Microsoft has a huge cash arsenal, and thus can afford it. Can Microsoft's competitors?

posted by Dana Bostrom @ 18:02