>You are right that standards going forward may be able to rewrite the conditions BUT they cannot set the license prices themselves that would be anti-competitive against the patent holders*
I'm not going to pretend to know the antitrust laws in any given jurisdiction, but do you see what I mean by inscrutable? It's fine (and indeed mandatory) to require "fair and reasonable non-discriminatory" terms, but nailing down an upper bound on what that actually means as a number is anti-competitive? It doesn't make any sense because it can't. Patents and antitrust are diametrically opposed things that happen to overlap one another.
Yes it's a mess. But it does make some sense as standards bodies may have members without patents that want to minimise the price and others who want to get high prices.
I'm not a lawyer but I wonder if there is room to require patent holders to declare a cap on the price of each patent before it is included in the patent and the standards group could decide to accept or reject the patent at that point.
Comments
>You are right that standards going forward may be able to rewrite the conditions BUT they cannot set the license prices themselves that would be anti-competitive against the patent holders*
I'm not going to pretend to know the antitrust laws in any given jurisdiction, but do you see what I mean by inscrutable? It's fine (and indeed mandatory) to require "fair and reasonable non-discriminatory" terms, but nailing down an upper bound on what that actually means as a number is anti-competitive? It doesn't make any sense because it can't. Patents and antitrust are diametrically opposed things that happen to overlap one another.
Yes it's a mess. But it does make some sense as standards bodies may have members without patents that want to minimise the price and others who want to get high prices.
I'm not a lawyer but I wonder if there is room to require patent holders to declare a cap on the price of each patent before it is included in the patent and the standards group could decide to accept or reject the patent at that point.