Google inclined to continue FRAND abuse | Hacker News Reader

Google inclined to continue FRAND abuse

fosspatents.blogspot.com

1 pointraganesh5 comments

Give me a break. Apple wanted to use every single tool at their disposal and every single friendly Court around the world to block the competitors from entering the market, and now that the competitors found a way to block them, they whine that they are too rough with them, and want EU to save them? I think it's pathetic and highly hypocritical of Apple.

They wanted a patent war, they have one. If they want it to stop, I'm sure Google and the others are willing to stop if Apple agrees to cease fire first. But of course they won't do that. So excuse me while I don't care about Apple's whining.

The issue is that those companies agreed to licence those patents non-discriminatory and at reasonable terms to anybody that wants to implement those standards (that rely on those patented technologies).

I don't think it would be possible to have industry standards (H.264, Wifi, 3G etc) without such obligations.

Apple (and others) need to pay the patent holders licence fees, but those fees should be non-discriminatory (i.e. similar to the terms offered to other companies). It's not OK to try to use those patents to shut a competitor out.

As far as I know Apple hasn't sued anybody over FRAND patents - they're perfectly in their right to try use their patents the way they do. Samsung, Motorola etc are free to do the same with non-FRAND patents, but what they're doing at the moment is definitely not OK.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRAND

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#RAND

Let us be clear - this is not about Apple.

As written in the post: "...if a BMW car implements H.264 or UMTS, they will want 2.25% of the price of the car, even if it means a per-unit royalty in the thousands of euros".

Are you saying that it is fair or reasonable on Google's part to demand that? After committing to FRAND terms for the patent in question?

How much would the car be worth without the UMTS radio? How much would a phone be worth without a UMTS radio? There's actually some research on the bad affects of patents that suggests when you have large numbers of people who have been given veto rights over a technology via patents, they will all rationally overvalue their own contribution since they all hold veto power. This then leads to a gridlock sitution in which technology is underutilized due to prices rising above the price anyone would pay. (see The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives by Michael Heller)

Don't get me wrong, I don't think there should be any royalties on standards, either everyone is forced to use it by network effects, or you have to pay but not both. It just leads to organizations stuffing standards with irrelevant patents to the detriment of the technology rather than improving out of patent term technology. (You can see the same happen with patent medicines).

Though it's interesting that Google/Motorola can apparently ask for thousands of dollars to use H.264, after they've spent hundreds of millions on VP8 to offer a competing codec to everyone for free, and the owners of the FRAND patents on H.264 have been threatening to put them out of the codec business since apparently only they own the rights to competitive encoding technology. Does that sound Fair, Reasonable or Non-Discriminatory?

But it appears "committing to FRAND terms" doesn't actually mean anything, so either all these big companies are idiots to agree to a wishy-washy non-agreement, or they all thought they could screw other people to their own advantage by keeping things vague.

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