RAND licensed patents with possible royalty/fee [LWN.net]

RAND licensed patents with possible royalty/fee

Posted Sep 11, 2012 20:07 UTC (Tue) by tterribe (✭ supporter ✭, #66972)
In reply to: RAND licensed patents with possible royalty/fee by BrucePerens
Parent article: The Opus codec becomes an IETF standard

Hi Bruce,

Please see the statement on Opus's royalty-free status from our previous article: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/08/opus-support-for-webrtc/
I believe everything we said there was accurate and still applies.

We'd love to say a lot more about the IPR disclosures you referenced, but are still waiting for approval from our legal department. I'm sure you understand the difficulties with being allowed to say in public as much as we already have.

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RAND licensed patents with possible royalty/fee

Posted Sep 11, 2012 20:20 UTC (Tue) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link]

Hi Tim,

I wrote to the appropriate people at Qualcom about this, asking for them to help to get the company on board. I don’t know anyone at Huawei.

I understand that you won’t be allowed to say anything without approval of counsel.

If companies that obviously make use of tons of Open Source software in their products take the stance that they will also attempt to encumber our work, we really should put some social pressure upon them. This is regardless of whether we think their patents are actually applicable or not – they are making the claim and should bear the cost of that.

Of course, we should allow some time for them to change their minds, or for private contacts to do their work.

But there should be a date beyond which we do something, if these declarations are unchanged.

I am happy to speak confidentially with any party, +1 510-4PERENS if you’d like to call.

RAND licensed patents with possible royalty/fee

Posted Sep 12, 2012 23:35 UTC (Wed) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link]

It strikes me that if you're trying to convince people that this codec is free of sundry legal nasties, then "I can't even talk about it without my lawyer" is about the least confidence inspiring thing you could possibly say.