[Ip-health] Re: [A2k] Digtial television makers ask FCC to create patent pool for DTV patents, in order to avoid excessive royalities

[Norbert Bollow]

James Love <james.love@keionline.org> wrote:

> Thanks to Konstantinos for bringing this to my attention.  Digital
> television manufacturers are asking the FCC to mandate the establishment
> of a patent pool for digital television with open licenses and
> reasonable royalties.    The petition to the FCC focuses on the problems
> of excessive royalties charged by two patent owners, for patents that
> are needed to comply with an FCC standard.
>
> KEI will consider supporting this petition.
>
> Jamie
>
>
> http://www.techweb.com/article/showArticle?articleID=212700600

A better solution to this problem that patents on standards give
patent holders the power to demand excessive royalties is to
change patent law by adding the following analogon to the fair-use
exception of copyright law:

  "For patented techniques which are required by international
   (i.e. ISO, IEC or ITU) standards or national regulations,
   implementation in Free and Open Source Software and use of
   such FOSS implementations is always allowed without having
   to pay royalties."

This does not deny patent-holders the chance of getting reasonable
royalties, because as long as the royalty demands are not excessive,
there will be proprietary implementations and corresponding royalties.
Excessive royalties are prevented by the economic mechanism that if
the cost of patent licenses is too great, businesses will be driven
to FOSS implementations.

This proposal would also solve the problem that in the current system
which grants excessive power to holders of software patents, any
single patent on any single aspect of a single standard can have huge
effects of preventing the success of FOSS in a huge domain of technogoly.

I'm writing a somewhat in-depth paper on this proposal.  If someone
here is interested, please drop me an email, and I'll send you a
copy when it's finished.

Greetings,
Norbert