The world of IP (Internet Protocol) and that of "Intellectual Property" on telecommunication standards are moving toward convergence, and it is unclear which of the two ways of life will dominate. The European Parliament opted for the former in september 2003, but the Council may be pushing for the latter.
Sandbridge Technologies filed at least four virtual patents at WIPO in 2003, all covering methods of data exchange, "and has yet to earn a dime", as Forbes Magazine reports. Meanwhile the drive for royalty-free telecom standards is gaining momentum.
"John Waclawsky, a technical leader of the Cisco mobile wireless group, says cellular phone operators come from the traditional telephone industry, which tends towards vertically integrated, rigid, circuit-switched technologies." http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/hd_121603b.html?CMP=ILC-001
[Sandbridge Technologies patents according to EPO patent data base: http://register.epoline.org/espacenet/regsearch?CY=ep&LG=en&DB=REG&LS=1&NA=0&PN=&AP=&PR=&PA=sandbridge+technologies&IN=&REP=&OPP=&IC=&theSubmit=Submit]
Forbes article about Sandbridge: Guenter Weinberger runs a company that is barely two years old, has only 40 employees and has yet to earn a dime
The MPEG4 licence calculator indicates that fee-based policies may not perform better than royalty-free policies
Even if Bruce Perens Open Standards definition clashes with the presentation of MPEG4 as an open standard, there are overlappings: "The problem with vertical markets, not only in the business sense but also in the technology sense, is that at the end of the day, end-users don't benefit from them, and service deployment is slowed-down. Several attempts to dissolve them into the horizontal market have taken place and are meeting great resistance from this sort of "economic gravity" which makes vertical markets inevitable without open standards." (page 24)
Others argue in favour of royalty-free standards: "While alliance members note recent efforts to offer proprietary codecs for license, an open standard that is truly royalty-free will most efficiently encourage the widespread use of the state-of-the-art technology, to the benefit of consumers and industry worldwide." http://www.imtc.org/press/pressrel/press022003.asp
