Patent pool trickery

Posted Mar 27, 2025 9:47 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: The world beyond OpenH264 by Wol
Parent article: Bhattcharya: Closing the chapter on OpenH264

Note that this sort of thing is one of the reasons behind patent pools for codecs; that creates a non-practising entity which has the right to sublicense all of the patents it licenses, but does not itself sell another other than patent licences.

Their primary reason to exist is to work around all the ways in which people might end up with a patent licence without paying for it - and one of the things they are quite legally able to do is to say that you have to prove that (say) Microsoft has a valid patent licence that it sublicensed to you under the GPL terms when it distributed a GPL'd codec. After all, if Microsoft doesn't have a licence itself, it can't pass it on to you - and Microsoft is not obliged to detail what patent licences it does, or does not, hold, merely to confirm that it's passed on all licences that it holds.

This means that relying on the terms of the GPL ends up with you being on the sharp end of an expensive lawsuit, since you need to pursue your upstream for discovery to show that they have licences they can pass onto you - and that not only gets pricy, but also runs the risk of exposing your upstream to further legal action (if they did not, in fact, have licences they could pass onto you).