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Comment by Tyrannosaurs | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft may not be what it once was but they're a big enough beast that I'd be thinking twice about this sort of move.

But that's kind of micro level stuff, at the macro level it's just another volley in the on-going patent wars where it seems that lawyers will win and the companies and the consumers lose.

Common sense says it will end soon but it really doesn't feel like that's happening.

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Google and Microsoft are at war since Eric Schmidt became CEO, so there are two beasts fighting anyway. Microsoft broke the gentleman's agreement by using software patents to cripple Android.

What gentleman's agreement ? Companies have always sued each other over patents since they were introduced.

What IS new is abusing the principles of FRAND that underpins every standard today. I mean what is going to happen if some 2-bit patent holder of the WiFi standard decides to hold everyone to ransom and demand $1000 per patent license ?

Google could not be more evil if they tried right now.

It says something that Microsoft is the only company that has been sued so far. May be Apple will be next, but these are the companies that initiate patent wars against their competitors. Now that the companies are hitting back, you think it is a bad precedent ? I'd be more worried if they start doing it to smaller companies than giants like these.

     Companies have always sued each other over patents 
     since they were introduced.

That's bullshit, as software companies suing each other is a new phenomenon. Otherwise you would have heard of IBM suing Microsoft and Oracle into oblivion from the 90'ties.

What really started this trend was Apple entering the mobile space with the iPhone, suing and getting sued by others. God forbid other companies following this trend. Considering how Nokia is doing these days, imagine if they started suing everybody else with their huge GSM-related portfolio. Or IBM, which has such a huge portfolio that it most likely touches on everything technology-related.

We are really heading heads on to a full war in the software industry that will cripple innovation, with the winners being those that produce less products then everybody else.

Apple didn't start this. In my opinion, Amazon started in, in 1999, when they sued Barnes and Noble over the prototypical stupid software patent: one click buying.

The "gentlemen"'s agreement is that big corps, via things like FRAND and patent thickets insulate themselves from competition from startups and other outsiders (e.g. Apple entering the mobile phone world, Linux or Android stepping on Microsoft's toes) but don't enforce those patents against the other incumbents, that's why they never bothered to actually nail down what their rights and obligations were.

FRAND isn't really anything to do with a gentleman's agreement, it's a basis for licensing patents required for standards.

The ND part of FRAND (non-descriminatory) actually means that start ups should be treated no differently.

Yes, and the FR means it should be "Fair" and "Reasonable" but if we just believed the names people gave things then who could be against the PATRIOT act, for example. In reality you need to look at what actually gets put into the laws and licences, not just the name.

To give just one example H.264 is FRAND, yet you pay a fee for broadcast television, and you pay a fee for pay TV on the internet over 12 minutes of length, but you don't pay fees for free video on the web (but until recently they weren't guaranteeing that would continue). Why?

Because the TV market is locked-in and they have no hope of switching away from MPEG/H.264 but in the Web market it was much more likely for an upstart like Flash's VP6 or Google's VP8 to compete, so they drop the price. What's non-discriminatory about that? They've structured the licence fees precisely to undermine competition in specific markets. (I believe the 12 minute minimum for charging is because the online porn industry would have switched away if that allowance wasn't made, but I don't have a source for that.)

Furthermore, they put a cap on fees so that big corps only pay a max per year, which means everyone else pays a higher marginal cost per device or unit.

Finally, their business model is incompatible with open-source software and often awkward even for proprietary software distributed cheap or for free. Given all that (and there's more of the same) how can you say FRAND is non-discriminatory?

And there's far too much idealizing of "standards" in this thread. Standards themselves, though often started to avoid horrible vendor lock-in have been thoroughly gamed for a long time, and again often serve the puproses of the usual large incumbents over the end-users or society's needs.

Call me a pessimist, but I don't see IP law in general ever getting any better.

Call me an optimist. But I think some time soon there will be such a ridiculous lawsuit, that even politicians/the electorate will see that it's time to review IP laws.

I think the problem is that all the companies involved (Apple, Microsoft, Google etc) are American; if the products of one American company are banned somewhere, another American company will invariably benefit. I think if an American companies products were being banned in the US to the benefit of a non-US company, only then will US law-makers start raising their eyebrows.

I'm not necessarily thinking that the laws will change, just that we'll go back to the situation of a few years ago where enforcement was a little less vigorous.

Merely the potential for dumb rather than the ongoing implementation of dumb.

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