Eric, I did take a quick look at Baskerville and elsewhere early this evening and saw the hype, something like there'll be 30% royalties if nothing is done about it, leading to demolition of newer competitors without IPR to trade, leading to a collapse in innovation.... It's hard to find trustworthy information at this turning point in the industry. Even more distorted PR than usual.
The link I posted was interesting in light of the history of change in alliances since 2002. We're looking at some big developers (NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Siemens) in an alliance which has settled on purportedly justifiable numbers. I couldn't find any nonsense in there at all.
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Q 3: Who decides which patents are certified "essential"? A 3: There is a two-stage process for certifying a patent as essential. Initially, a patent is evaluated by an Evaluation Panel (comprising a Lead Evaluator and two Assistant Evaluators; all three are patent attorneys) established by an independent International Patent Evaluation Consortium (IPEC), currently grouping together fourteen patent law firms in Asia (China, Japan and Korea), Australia, Europe (France, Germany, Italy and UK) and the United States. IPEC declares that the patent is essential based on an agreed Evaluation Process.
The second stage is to subject the IPEC declared essential patent to an industry "objection process” by members of PlatformWCDMA and 3G Patents (common service company responsible for the overall evaluation and certification process). Following a successful outcome of the "objection process" 3G Patents certifies the patent as essential. The Certified Patents are then integrated into the W-CDMA Patent Licensing Programme.
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and they came up with about 1.5% for the property that exists now among the group. |
