>While I generally agree, it sounds a bit like "if you're successful, you're not allowed to earn money". No, it's "if you're successful by NORMALLY ILLEGAL COL

>While I generally agree, it sounds a bit like "if you're successful, you're not allowed to earn money". No, it's "if you're successful by NORMALLY ILLEGAL COLLUSION, than the ways in which you're allowed to earn money may be restricted." That's what "encumbered standards" are at the end of the day, explicitly established horizontal monopolies. Those mathematics patents covering H.264 wouldn't be worth remotely the same if there were a hundred different video formats going around of which only 1 or 2 used them. Or if everyone had just stuck with MPEG-2. Of course, the world would also overall be worse off in those cases too, with an even higher risk of vertical monopolies, wasted hardware/bandwidth, etc. So it makes sense to have a middle ground, to allow "standards" to grow the total pie non-linearly larger than it would have been otherwise. But at the same time that needs to be combined with much more stringent controls to avoid all the normal obvious risks of monopolies. Actors like Nokia and Qualcomm have been trying to have their cake and eat it too. They like the enormous monopoly lock-in value the standards give their patents, but then they also want to treat them like normal individual patents they can cut deals around. That's not how it should work. The reward for a Standards Essential Patent should be a reliable, fair fixed cut of a very, very big and dependable pie for the life of the patents/pool. Companies have the choice to go it alone if they'd like instead and not join the standard, which can then seek to work around them (or if that's impossible, disband and give up and at least not form any monopoly there). But if they have patents in a standard, they should face more restrictions due to the extra monopoly. It should be one or the other, not both.