Litigation is rarely a smart move for a licensing organisation. During the years wasted going back/forth during appeals etc the competitor has a price margin advantage which they can use to increase market share. It's not that easy to quantity that if damages are awarded.
And seriously you either need to put up or STFU. If you have some prior art that invalidates specific patents then speak up. Plenty of companies would be very, very interested. But I'm going to take a guess that you don't.
It's the MPEG-LA who needed to put up or shut up, as you put it. Vague threats of assembling a patent pool, a threat that never materialized, are not evidence of infringement. I'm inclined to believe that the deal with Google this late in the game indicates that MPEG-LA didn't have a leg to stand on, as while they were negotiating with Google they could have gone after Mozilla or other VPx users.
I think this story sounds like great news. MPEG LA's licensors include the research labs -- Fraunhofer, etc -- not your usual patent trolling companies. This gives the labs a sugar daddy (Google) that has a commercial interest in paying them for it their advances to be licensed to the public. Which is a nice release valve, because government budget squeezes means there's always more and more pressure for research labs to lock up their tech to earn money from commercialising it. Good on Google for doing this.
> And seriously you either need to put up or STFU. If you have some prior art that invalidates specific patents then speak up. Plenty of companies would be very, very interested. But I'm going to take a guess that you don't.
To quote Seth Meyers -- Really?
So you honestly believe that all the MPEG-LA patents are true innovations? Or just perhaps, having 100+ patents, an army of lawyers, and an FTC antitrust pass is intimidating enough to trump whether the patents are for the most part frankly crap.
Not sure who I'm misquoting here, but in reality you can patent a ham sandwich.
Litigation is rarely a smart move for a licensing organisation. During the years wasted going back/forth during appeals etc the competitor has a price margin advantage which they can use to increase market share. It's not that easy to quantity that if damages are awarded.
And seriously you either need to put up or STFU. If you have some prior art that invalidates specific patents then speak up. Plenty of companies would be very, very interested. But I'm going to take a guess that you don't.