The funniest part is that MPEG-LA doesn't even gross that much money in license fees to get distributed to the pool — it's effectively peanuts for pretty much e

The funniest part is that MPEG-LA doesn't even gross that much money in license fees to get distributed to the pool — it's effectively peanuts for pretty much everyone paying in (only producers of 100,000 devices need to pay, and then it's pennies apiece with a total cap), and it's peanuts for all the pool members receiving the payments too! They aren't directly hurting anyone's bottom line, nor is anyone really profiting from it. It's just a bureaucracy for FUD-maintenance, that was originally created to keep its members from fucking with one another. If anything really gets out of hand, the government will just force them into a more liberal patent pool — it was done before to the Wright Brothers for being dicks, and in wartime to quasi-nationalize military IP.