“The European Commission said it believed Motorola Mobility, a unit of Google, was abusing its market position by seeking and enforcing an injunction against Apple in Germany over patents essential to mobile phone standards,” Rex Merrifield reports for Reuters.
“The Commission said injunctions could be used to combat patent infringements, but that was not the case where a potential licensee was prepared to agree on licensing terms,” Merrifield reports. “Almunia said earlier this year that regulators were considering charging more firms with anti-competitive practices in using injunctions to prevent rivals using their patents rather than negotiating fair fees.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Do not abuse FRAND.
I believe ALL standards essential patents must be licensed at a standard rate across the entire industry. There can be a single, one time fee plus a cost per device based upon lot sizes (e.g., $xxx up front, $0.yy in lots of one million, $0.zz [less than $0.yy] in lots of 10 million, etc.). However, that fee structure (whatever it is) must be applied to *ALL* device makers.
Additionally, the fee structure *MUST* be agreed to by both the company and the full standards committee before the patented intellectual property is formally accepted as part of the standard. (And **absolutely** no more of a company coming into a standards committee and getting a technology included in the standard without the company disclosing up front that the technology is patented. It’s happened before and must never happen again.)
There *must* be no “after the fact” license fee deals. There *must* be no fee deals on a company by company basis where non competitors get better rates than competitors.
Thus a company can charge $0.50 per cell phone for a patent that is required for LTE-Advanced, and *any* cell phone maker can license that patent for that rate or choose to not support LTE-Advanced. If 200 million cell phones/tablets across the entire industry support LTE-A then the company makes $100 million on that patent.
OK. Down off my soap box now.
I agree somewhat but not all patents are equally important to a standard, I’m not sure a one size fits all is really best idea. I do agree that the should be standard rates, perhaps an arbitration where a company can make a case how high their fees should be and then once that gets settled that is the cost for everyone, period.
No need for one-price-fits-all. Just require that you set the price when you propose the patented tech. If you try to assert after the standard is implemented you are banned from using all patents that are in the standard properly. Preferably banned forever.
Sorry for the confusion.
I was not suggesting that all patents would get the same flat rate. I was suggesting that the negotiations on the rate be done *before* the standards body accepted the technology to be part of the standard. A truly innovative and critical component of the standard that significantly moved the technology forward would certainly get a higher patent fee than something that was not critical to the implementation or something that just was an evolution of what was already in an earlier version of the standard.
Cut it short:
Google is messing with all of us by abusing the internet technology for its own profits. Googles next step is taking over the mobile sector and of course more.
No ethic boundaries for Sergej Brin and Larry Page and Eric Schmidt.
Proclaiming they are doing it all in the name of freedom, that is the trick.
Did you realize there are i.e. lots of videos you cannot watch, if you make use of any google-disconnect plug-in on the web ?
This company is owning the internet almost, and they are collaborating with governments to control the internet technology.
Not too hard to see this is essentially Big Brother behavior.
Shut down Google, now.
Or it will bite our ass before the end of this decade.
Thanks, I have downloaded Disconnect.me on Safari, Firefox and Chrome…
Good.
But hopefully Apple doesn’t get caught in this net in the future. There is a risk even though they aren’t using SEPs,