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Comment by phoboslab | Hacker News Reader

It's not clear that Motorola didn't offer "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms" for licensing. Microsoft claims licensing would cost them $4bn/year; Motorola disputes this claim.

Also, who is to say that $4bn/year isn't "fair" when video is an essential part of Microsofts products?

Don't get me wrong, I hate patents as much as everyone else here, but I still think this lawsuit poses as a very nice example of why free video/audio codecs are important.

We had the same shit with LZW/GIF patents a decade earlier and all the warnings were ignored and laughed at ("Nerds with tinfoil hats" ~Gruber). Microsoft (and Apple) doesn't deserve better for their arrogant stance on this issue.

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> Also, who is to say that $4bn/year isn't "fair" when video is an essential part of Microsofts products?

Anyone who's sane. $4bn/year? That's nuts. It would be nuts even if that was the licensing fees for complete H.264 coverage. However, it's not complete coverage, because there are hundreds of patents in the H.264 pool. http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avc-att1.p...

It's not clear to me whether these two particular patents are in the pool or not. I assume not, because otherwise Microsoft would have a license for them through MPEG-LA already. However, given that Motorola was involved in the creation of H.264, it seems that their patent assertions here might be illegal. Some of Qualcomm's patents were apparently thrown out because they didn't disclose them properly and include them in the patent pool. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264#Patent_licensing

Also, who is to say that $4bn/year isn't "fair" when video is an essential part of Microsofts products?

All the other H.264 patents have been voluntarily licensed for ~$5M/year, so to reach $4B Moto would have to argue that its patents are worth one thousand times as much as all the others combined.

Another way to look at it: There are thousands of patents that read on Windows. If each one cost $4B/year, patent license fees would exceed total Windows revenue.

>It's not clear that Motorola didn't offer "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms" for licensing. Microsoft claims licensing would cost them $4bn/year; Motorola disputes this claim.

It's not clear why Motorola should be able to do in the first place. If Motorola's patents cover encoding and decoding of H.264, those patents should be in MPEG LA's pool. However, Motorola is not listed as licensor on the website(http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Licensors.aspx ). Since the pool covers all the essential patents related to encoding and decoding H.264, why isn't Motorola included in the list?

Nobody is forced to join the MPEG LA, in fact their behavior is pretty much illegal. They are explicitly banned to claim, assume or declare that it is impossible to encode/decode videos without a license from them. Which is pretty much what they do.

That's tangential to the problem at hand. MPEG LA's entire purpose for existing is to be a one stop shop for the essential H.264 codec patents. So instead of going to MS, Apple, Samsung, Hitachi, etc. individually, you just go to MPEG LA, get a license, then go on with your life.

Motorola is not on that list, and have not granted their patents. However, since they're asserting that it covers the encoding and decoding of H.264, it's questionable whether or not they can assert them against H.264 codecs. In fact, the US courts have invalidated patents that were not declared to the pool before. See dpark's post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3919324

Thanks for rephrasing.

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