I don't always agree with Florian's opinions (although I'm not usually that far off) but his facts are usually solid.
Groklaw also had coverage but was often really quite disappointing when it moved beyond the SCO case. There seemed very much a Google good Apple bad, patents bad, FRAND patents not quite as bad when they are being used on people we don't like attitude.
There are probably some good comments on some HN discussions although many people seem to be under a mistaken impression that standards essential patents are better and more inventive than others when commonly the reverse is true.
My summary:
Standards are a bit like laws and sausages - you don't want to see how they are made.
Standards bodies are groups of competitors meeting in a room to set terms of business going forwards which without a signficant number of rules (including the declaration and FRAND licensing commitment of related patents) would be illegal under anti-trust/competition law.
Often with a standard like a codec there are many ways to implement each part of the process e.g. transforming, filtering, compressing, encoding.... Many of these approaches will have similar performance or perform well in different scenarios, many will also be patented. Companies want their patents included as (whether they are good or bad patents) anyone can work around them if they aren't included in the standard so they would get no royalties for them. If included they will get a very small slice of a big pie. Horse trading goes on in addition to the inclusion of technologies on pure merit (we will vote for your filtering approach and you can vote for our encoding approach). Everyone both wants a good standard that people will use and to get as many patents in as possible. If a company has a patent that they don't want to license under the terms of the standards organisation (often very vague) they could declare that and the standard would be developed avoiding the technology (or potentially abandoned).
Patents
In principle a patent gives you the exclusive right to implement and/or license the technology and no-one should import/produce or distribute infringing technology without your permission. In practice many granted are invalid (partially or totally). If there were no FRAND commitments you could hold up any implementer of a standard in which you had a patent for virtually the whole value of the standard (and obviously if everyone did that nothing would get implemented).
Injuctions for FRAND
Courts can offer damages and injuctions. As you have agreed to license SEP (standards essential patents) under FRAND terms it should be clear that damages should be a sufficient remedy and injunctions unnecessary, the courts can sort it out later (unless the company is unlikely to be able to pay up or can't be brought to court in the jurisdiction when there may be case to impose and injunction).
Latest relevant one and a couple of others on topic but I haven't had time to review it all for the best ones:
http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/10/eu-commission-market-test...
http://www.fosspatents.com/2012/12/samsung-drops-all-request...
http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/07/motorolas-royalty-demand-...
I don't always agree with Florian's opinions (although I'm not usually that far off) but his facts are usually solid.
Groklaw also had coverage but was often really quite disappointing when it moved beyond the SCO case. There seemed very much a Google good Apple bad, patents bad, FRAND patents not quite as bad when they are being used on people we don't like attitude.
There are probably some good comments on some HN discussions although many people seem to be under a mistaken impression that standards essential patents are better and more inventive than others when commonly the reverse is true.
My summary:
Standards are a bit like laws and sausages - you don't want to see how they are made.
Standards bodies are groups of competitors meeting in a room to set terms of business going forwards which without a signficant number of rules (including the declaration and FRAND licensing commitment of related patents) would be illegal under anti-trust/competition law.
Often with a standard like a codec there are many ways to implement each part of the process e.g. transforming, filtering, compressing, encoding.... Many of these approaches will have similar performance or perform well in different scenarios, many will also be patented. Companies want their patents included as (whether they are good or bad patents) anyone can work around them if they aren't included in the standard so they would get no royalties for them. If included they will get a very small slice of a big pie. Horse trading goes on in addition to the inclusion of technologies on pure merit (we will vote for your filtering approach and you can vote for our encoding approach). Everyone both wants a good standard that people will use and to get as many patents in as possible. If a company has a patent that they don't want to license under the terms of the standards organisation (often very vague) they could declare that and the standard would be developed avoiding the technology (or potentially abandoned).
Patents
In principle a patent gives you the exclusive right to implement and/or license the technology and no-one should import/produce or distribute infringing technology without your permission. In practice many granted are invalid (partially or totally). If there were no FRAND commitments you could hold up any implementer of a standard in which you had a patent for virtually the whole value of the standard (and obviously if everyone did that nothing would get implemented).
Injuctions for FRAND
Courts can offer damages and injuctions. As you have agreed to license SEP (standards essential patents) under FRAND terms it should be clear that damages should be a sufficient remedy and injunctions unnecessary, the courts can sort it out later (unless the company is unlikely to be able to pay up or can't be brought to court in the jurisdiction when there may be case to impose and injunction).