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Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

Yet again the EU gets tricked into an anti-consumer position. I wonder if Fraunhofer is whispering in someone's ear.

What does Fraunhaufer have to do with it? If we're randomly guessing which company might have instigated this investigation, I'd guess Sisvel, because it's easy to imagine for them to have an actual case: Sisvel has created an AV1 patent pool and iirc even made an open call for patent owners to approach them to get their patents added to the pool. It's easy to see how an anti-trust complaint could arise if someone left the pool or didn't join it because of real or imaginary pressure from AOMedia members.

What makes you think this is them getting tricked, and not just them looking after the interests of EU companies? The EU's role isn't primarily as a consumer rights advocacy group after all.

It's not the first comment that mentions Fraunhofer. Can someone please explain to me what/who is that and why do many assume they are behind this?

Fraunhofer is an institution in Germany positioned between universities and the industry. They provide applied research and license it to companies.

For example mp3 was mainly developed there. They hold many patents in the field of audio and video coding which obviously fund parts of the organization.

More recently, they established a new audio codec for Bluetooth LE under proprietary license which in my opinion does not have any advantages over OPUS.

At the same time not all of the criticism is fair because they are not a patent troll and anticompetitive in their license agreements.

“Gets tricked”. It’s incredible the things that some people come up with to excuse the EU.

For many people in the northern EU countries the EU is a religion.

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