Re:The Fight for Patent-Unencumbered Media Codecs Is Nearly Won
by adrianratnapala on Wednesday January 10, 2018 @05:16PM
(#16119667)
It can't be quite as simple as that. Because the amount of money they can extract from such a thing doesn't depend on the amount of patents covering it -- it only depends on how much people are willing to pay for a video codec.
What I can imagine is that every single stakeholder who had some kind of video patent would want to get a share of that pie, so they played whatever political game they could to bloat the spec to include their own patent.
In one case, the objective is to develop a codec that fits certain parameters, one of them being cost effective.
In the other, the objective is to cram anything patentable into the standard, in order to maximize patent fees from the users for years to come. In the past, this caused the MPEG patents to be unnecessary bloated AND having to pay for that unnecessary bloat. It was far from simple exchange of goods and services for money; it was rent seeking at its finest.