“Major news agencies (Bloomberg, Dow Jones, Reuters) report on a ‘settlement offer’ that Google subsidiary Motorola Mobility made Microsoft, and Microsoft’s response, describing this as ‘little more than an effort to change the subject’ at time when antitrust authorities are increasingly concerned over standard-essential patents (SEP) abuse,” Florian Mueller reports for FOSS Patents.
“I’ll get to the numbers involved in a moment, but the very first indication that Google (Motorola) didn’t really mean this offer to be acceptable is that the offers parties make during the course of real settlement talks are held confidential and not shared with news agencies on the record,” Mueller reports. “All that gets announced at the end of real settlement talks is that there is a deal, and the most that will be said about the terms is an indication as to which party ends up the net payer, without staying dollar/cent amounts. The Apple-Nokia settlement is a representative example.”
Mueller reports, “The only reason why someone would make such an offer public is to play a perception game in the political arena. In this case, obvious motivations would be to influence decisions (such as by discouraging regulators from taking forceful action) and, possibly, to set the stage for aggressive measures such as new court filings or enforcement initiatives.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The saga continues.
Related articles:
Mozilla considers supporting H.264 after poor WebM uptake – March 14, 2012
Google’s WebM (VP8) allegedly infringes the rights of at least 12 patent holders – July 29, 2011
MPEG LA goes gunning for Google, announces call for patents essential to VP8 video codec – February 11, 2011
Along with Apple, Microsoft fully backs H.264, unlike Google – February 2, 2011
Google intent on derailing HTML5 H.264 video with WebM browser plugins for Safari, IE – January 15, 2011
Google pulls support for H.264 video out of Chrome web browser – January 11, 2011
Google’s VP8/WebM may face patent fight as Apple-backed MPEG-LA considers patent pool – May 21, 2010
Apple may be planning to sue Google over WebM video project, VP8 codec – May 20, 2010
Google’s big open video plan is called the WebM project…
Jobs: Ogg Theora may violate patents – Friday, April 30, 2010
So, does anyone know if Apple has H264 patents or a license yet or will they be impacted by this.???
Apple does have patents pertaining to H.264. Both Microsoft and Apple have gone on record saying that they would never litigate or use SEPs a means of coercion as Motorola and Samsung seem to enjoy doing.
If Apple or Microsoft wanted to they could take the same low road, they both have many, many patents relating to 3G, WiFi, etc. that are SEPs.
“Apple is firmly behind H.264 because it delivers superb quality digital video and is based on open standards that no single company controls,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing.
2004 Source article:
H.264 Video Codec Adopted for Next Generation DVDs
Apple contributed code to the H.264 project. Google/Motorola has no one by the balls here. They don’t ‘own’ H.264. Technically, nobody does. Google/Motorola can’t threaten to pull their contribution to the project. It can’t be done.
From reading the source article at FOSS Patents, Google/Motorola as grand-standing:
Just based on the number of patent families (which is more favorable to Motorola than the citation approach), Motorola would be entitled to approximately 10% of the pool rate. Since the pool rate is capped at $6.5 million per year, we’re talking about $650,000 on that basis, while Motorola itself says that Microsoft would have to pay, if it accepted its “settlement offer”, $150 million if it sells 300 million copies of Windows…. That’s the luxury you can afford if you ask for the moon: you can slash your demand by a factor of 20-25 and still be hundreds of times above the actual market level.
Oh look, another EVIL move by Google. 😛
grammar police. please read:
‘Google/Motorola is grand-standing…’
Boycotting Google since 2010.
According to Florian Mueller, Moto/Google’s patents are worth about 2-cents per device. Moto/Google want 50-cents:
http://www.fosspatents.com/2012/06/googles-newest-h264-royalty-demand-is.html