Posted on 04/26/2013 6:55:48 AM PDT by SmokingJoe
A federal court in Seattle issued a ruling Thursday that could help settle the question of just how much a company can expect to reap from standards-essential patents.
In the highly anticipated court ruling, U.S. District Judge James Robart determined that Google’s Motorola Mobility unit is entitled to about $1.8 million a year from Microsoft for its use of certain patents.
Motorola had been seeking in excess of $4 billion in the case, which centered around patents related to the the H.264 video standard and the 802.11 wireless standard.
In making its determination, the court noted that there are some 92 different entities with patents essential to 802.11 networking. If each of them got the 1.15 percent to 1.73 percent royalty that Motorola wanted, the cost of wireless networking alone would exceed the price of the Xbox Microsoft was using it in.
“This decision is good for consumers because it ensures patented technology committed to standards remains affordable for everyone, Microsoft Deputy General Counsel David Howard said in a statement.
(Excerpt) Read more at allthingsd.com ...
/johnny
It will be interesting to see what the CAFC does with this. And ultimately the Supreme Court. This is far from done - though we now have a good idea of the floor and the ceiling. The parties will likely settle in between rather than force the issue to a final conclusion through full appeals.
They eventually failed and were acquired by Compaq, and that merged company eventually failed and fell into the hands of HP, which sold off the computer division to somebody else.
More recently HP fell upon hard times when they bought Electronic Data Systems (EDS) for $14 Billion, or about $9 billion more than it was worth.
That turkey was bought for $2.4 billion from Perot by General Motors, itself, a loser then being set up for some serious manufacturing gutting by its own top management.
The big dome thinkers in and among these companies went somewhere ~ and I get the feeling they went into the business of suing other companies over the question of exclusivity of patents ~ even though they all had a piece of the action leading back to that DEC idea ~ and the joint chip protocol package that was supposed to save them all.
Did I say Motorola was involved in this ~ must have ~ they were the guys who launched 800 satellites to support a ground based world wide phone system that was even then being supplanted by the far more expansive, and cheaper, cell phone technology.
The only smart guy in any of this was Perot ~ he got out of GM early. Noteworthy is that at the time of the last lawsuit between Perot and GM, it was speculated that GM management feared that Perot would 'gut EDS' ~ which, of course, was something GM management had planned for the whole GM complex of companies.
> The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
LOL!!!
Post of the day!!
/johnny
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