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The fee has to be "reasonable", and in fact courts will step in when the patent holder is being demonstrably unreasonable, even going so far as to put the paten
by tsotha 15y ago
The fee has to be "reasonable", and in fact courts will step in when the patent holder is being demonstrably unreasonable, even going so far as to put the patent in the public domain.
I'm not sure exactly how that translates into a dollar figure for license fees. But the patent holder certainly has an interest in at least appearing to work with potential licensees.
- brk 15y agoStill, "reasonable" can be widely interpreted, and take another many years to settle if the courts are involved. Applying a basic sniff test, if all patents had to be licensed for reasonable fees to competitors, there would be almost no sense in having patents in the first place. Additionally terms like "blocking patents" in terms of intellectual property barriers to entry in a marketplace would also likely not need to exist. IANAL, but I do believe from my own experience that Apple can effectively decide to not make their patents available to HTC if they so choose in this case.