Comment Re:I've never understood... (Score 1) 184
...why any "standard" would include patented technology. Seems like a very stupid idea. About the same as copyrighting the spelling of words.
It's because you want a standard to include the best possible technology, and a lot of that is patented. But most of the time that's fine, because a standard only becomes a standard if everyone accepts it as a standard, and that only happens if licensing conditions are acceptable to the huge majority of players in the market. That's what happened with MP3 and h.264; they are free for small companies, cheap for medium sized companies and relatively cheap for big companies.
And that's the problem here, some guys with patents wanting unacceptable amounts of money. So the expectation is that the potential licensors will say "f*** that, we stay with h.264" and the standard is dead in the water, until these patent holders irrevocably agree to cut down their license fee demands. And make more money by getting a small amount of money from everybody rather than getting a huge amount from nobody.