In other news - "MPEG envisages royalty-free MPEG video coding standard"

Posted Feb 15, 2011 3:34 UTC (Tue) by butlerm (subscriber, #13312)
In reply to: In other news - "MPEG envisages royalty-free MPEG video coding standard" by tialaramex
Parent article: MPEG LA Announces Call for Patents Essential to VP8 Video Codec

This problem affects the RAND standards too - a previously unknown company could pop up at any moment and announce that it has a relevant patent and it wants $5Bn in license fees or damages from say, Apple.

Patents are evil - there is not much you can do about that except repeal the patent laws.