When a patent is part of standard, you can not use it to block people. You can only use it to get license from them.

If you proposed a "Fair, Raisonnable And Non-Discriminatory" (FRAND) licence scheme and this was rejected THEN you could ask for the licence to be imposed on the infringer or the products to be banned.
If you don't do propose a FRAND licence, it means that you did not respect your engagement made to the Standard Setting Organization and you lose your hability to enforce your patent.

Apple here complains that:
- Samsung and MMI never proposed licenses at all
- Samsung and MMI are trying to get Apple products blocked while with such patents the only thing you could get are forced licenses and not product blocking

The Nokia vs Apple was a good example where the distinct between FRAND and non-FRAND patent was clearly made and the corresponding requests were relevant.

From TFA (the one from Florian, the patent expert, not DailyTech, the tech reporting site), Samsung itself complained about Ericsson and Rambus for the usage of FRAND or undisclosed-essential patents and they should be barred from enforcing them.

Apple didn't even want to prevent Samsung from enforcing them. It just wants to separate the cases between : "having to pay a licence for FRAND patents" and "being blocked from selling products because of non-FRAND patents".

As usual, noone ever RTFAs.

I find dubious DailyTech calling Florin Mueller "a pro-Apple blogger" for his patent litigation analysis (most especially the difference in usage of FRAND patents between Nokia and Samsung) while Florian Mueller *IS* the professional expert on patents.

If MMI thought it had stronger patents in its portfolio, it would have brought them to court agains Apple and Microsoft. But only those 18 were put forward.

A FRAND encumbered patent can mostly allow obtaining licensing revenues. The only defense would be to enter a cross licensing deal where both party are avoiding paying licenses to each other.

There are 3 kinds of entities attacking Android :
- Apple wants Android blocked or at least some of its feature. Apple want to keep very distinctive feature to itself and does not intend to license them. A FRAND patent would help have Apple pay licensing fees, like it did for Nokia but it would not have Apple stop trying to block some features on Android phones.
- Microsoft wants to have revenues from Android so that device manufacturers would consider WP7 as a cheaper/same price alternative to Android. Here the MMI FRAND patents might help if Microsoft is found infringing those. However, Microsoft is handling the OS part : if MMI patents are related to hardware (like radio), those patents won't be able to provide revenues or cross licensing opportunities from Microsoft. Those are the kind of patent MMI would have leveraged against other Android licensees as it threatened to do.
- Patent Trolls or Non-Practicing Entities have no product to sell. No hardware. No software. So with FRAND patents or a plain vanilla patents, you can not retaliate by blocking its products or having them pay licenses.

In the end, only Microsoft kind of attack on Android might be curbed down by FRAND patents but this wouldn't affect much Apple and Patent Trolls.

RTFATitle : "Most important 18 patents" and the potential FRAND encumberance relates to those.

Some of those patents are encumbered by FRAND : Fair, Reasonnable and Non Discrimatory.
Such patents are essentiel to a global normalisation in which participant have to disclose their related patents and licence them in a fair, reasonnable and non discriminatory way. You can use them to get royalties but you'll have a hard time using them to block someone.

Remember, in Nokia vs Apple, Apple settlement rather quickly. In Apple vs Motorola, the litigation is still pending. So it seems that Apple considers those patents are rather weak.

At last, remember, Google bought Motorola also because it threatened OTHER ANDROID licensees !!!

It originally said : "you forgot the <sarcasm> tag" but /. considered it a true XML tag and stripped it.
I didn't use HTML entities.

I should have used the preview button.

You forgot the tag.

In theory, there are no difference.
In reality, almost no one plays for 2 years : most players stays only a few weeks or months and switch to a new game.

So, it is much more easy to find 2 players playing for 1 year than 1 player playing for 2.

And its price has been established on the statistical cost of usage. Ask Sony for perpetual right to resale your game without feature loss, and they'll be happy to give you a sell you a more expensive version.

You need 19 of them since HDMI is using 19 connectors. And 20 for HDMI Ethernet Channel.

Indeed HighSpeed is certified for 1080p (while most short Standard cable might work) and is required for 3D but it is NOT required for Ethernet since this is a independent feature. You can have Standard cable with or without Ethernet and HighSpeed cable with or without Ethernet.

Actually, this is Standard and not Normal. Sorry :)

There is no such thing as a "better cable". You have certified cable (made from better quality component for longer runs) and you have non certified or deceptive products.
Once a cable has passed the certification, ALL CABLES are the same regarding image quality.

Cause you buy a certified product.

HDMI certification does not care about the raw quality of the components required to build a cable. It just validates that the cable works.
So yes a longer cable requires better components. But as an end-product, it stays a Standard HDMI Cable or a HighSpeed HDMI cable.