Apple, as an American company doing business overseas, needs to comply with the local laws (overseas country of business) in addition to American laws and these two countries might have conflicting laws. It gets tricky, especially since apparently OpenTV is international.
Anything you license or sell you must offer to all without discrimination. .... Point is, by whatever factors pricing is determined, those must be applied fairly to all. That's just part of anti-trust law. So Apple will get a price it can afford if it needs to license the patents by virtue of the fact others, with far less financial wherewithal, have been able to license those patents and still remain viable businesses.
No such provision of the law regarding licensing patents. You can completely discriminate 'til your heart's content.
Assuming the patent/s in question have not been established as SEPs or under FRAND, which your post does not imply in the section i quoted. That's why you can have exclusive or non-exclusive licenses.
Point is, by whatever factors pricing is determined, those must be applied fairly to all. That's just part of anti-trust law. So Apple will get a price it can afford if it needs to license the patents by virtue of the fact others, with far less financial wherewithal, have been able to license those patents and still remain viable businesses.
Well, at least as far as German patent laws go, there is no such provision – and our anti-trust laws deal with anti-trust issues, not patent licensing. The patent fee can, within the established range per industry, be freely negotiated for each non-exclusive license covering the same patent – there is no obligation for fairness, non-discrimination etc. (And actually, because there are none, there are special provisions for SEPs – if this would apply to all patents, FRAND terms would not be necessary at all.) Even more important: if the fee is calculated based on the revenue for an entire product, or just a component implementing the patent, is freely negotiated. So, in case of an iPhone we could talk about anything from .4 percent of a component costing $10, or 4-5% of the entire product. That is quite some margin, and the court will normally not set the price or review other existing licensees when there is no SEP involved.
(Not saying the patent is any good, that is a different question entirely.)
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In this case it should have nothing, or very little, to do with the cost of the product [hardware], as the patents are about content delivery and not specific to enabling the hardware to function. Which is another reason the license fee should be in-line with what others pay
I didn't see Apple claim they were asking more from them than from others to license the IP. Did I miss it?
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