

Mutually Assured Minefields - ZeroGravitas
http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/theora/2010-April/003769.html

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hga
A very important essay:

Vague patent threats are made because " _specific statements would allow the
victims of this FUD to petition a court for a declaratory judgment of non-
infringement._ "

The MPEG formats are deliberate patent minefields" because the process
officially does not take patents into consideration (all parties agree to RAND
licensing ahead of time) and _every_ party is determined to make sure the
standard includes one or more of theirs even if it's unneeded or detrimental
to the standard, so that they'll have cross license status and won't have to
pay anything to use it.

(And that's what happens when all parties are playing by the rules. That
doesn't always happen (e.g. see Rambus, the RDRAM company) and in general
patents are making a hash of the standards process:
<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1134000>)

Most of these patents are " _exceptionally narrow, as it's much cheaper and
easier to obtain a very narrow patent._ "

Read the whole thing for the conclusion, which asserts that avoiding this MPEG
type mess is the best approach and implies that patent free formats are
possible, although of course there's no escaping the possibility of ending up
in court going _either_ way (in fact it might be more likely in the patent
centric approach).

