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Comment by blacklion | Hacker News Reader

What I don't understand, why do internationa; standardization organizations allows patent-encumbered technologies to become de-jure standards.

MPEG, WiFi, GSM…

IMHO, intentional standards must be implementable without any patent fees, or they are very bad standards.

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There's no law requiring wifi - "de facto". And they're standards because they're quite good! They have hardware support and parallelization and account for all use cases, even the marginal ones, and have reference implementations and support. Standards orgs don't care about patents because they're not relevant. This isn't a case of trolling - this is literally a software patent being used for its intended purpose by its developer, to extract profit by coming up with a new idea, and letting others use it.

International standardization organizations (like ISO) are not governmental organizations. They are private entities, which sometimes become too involved in official standards. But they are controlled by whoever funds them.

Standards organisations are older than publicly-available software. The concept of "reasonable and non-discriminatory" patent licensing was what they went with, and it seemed sensible at a time when goods were physical and the idea of giving away a product for which standards would be relevant would be ludicrous.

A quote from an Ecma presentation

    "ECMA for instance has made all the standards for DVD and optical disks. There were 5 recording formats. So there you are a little bit uneasy, of course. And again after a few beers I can ask the people in the room. Why do you want to have 5 formats? Do you still call that standardization? The answer is always the same: You are well paid. Shut up"

https://youtu.be/wITyO71Et6g?t=226

H.265 went absolutely nowhere

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