EU Charges Samsung With Abusing Vital Telecoms Patent

Dupple sends this news from Reuters: "The European Commission charged Samsung Electronics on Friday with abusing its dominant position in seeking to bar rival Apple from using a patent deemed essential to mobile phone use. The Commission sent a 'statement of objections' to the South Korean group, with its preliminary view that Samsung was not acting fairly. 'Intellectual property rights are an important cornerstone of the single market. However, such rights should not be misused when they are essential to implement industry standards, which bring huge benefits to businesses and consumers alike,' Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said in statement."

Re:Stupid

[Intropy]

I wouldn't go that far. It's good to encourage companies to contribute to standards so that we actually do get standards and not every company for itself. But I think it would be a good idea for open licensing terms to be part of any standards submission. So Samsung can suggest patented tech X as a standard, but that needs to come along with a statement that X will be licensed for 3 cents per device to anyone who wants to use it. The license should cover all reasonably foreseeable use cases, and any that come up later get decided by the standards body. Nothing would stop Samsung from also offering a different license agreement to anyone, but the standard one would always also be on the table.