On 7/03/2016 2:49 PM, Mark Newton wrote:
Then you’d know that RAND licensing is an area of active controversy, which some standards bodies have taken an active role in, particularly in the data communications space.
RAND: Reasonable And Non Discriminatory. Commonly misconstrued by those outside the standards world to mean Royalty Free. Not the same, by a longshot. Just means trying to keep out predatory companies from making and open standard that then prices all competitors (Reasonable) or selectively (Non-Discriminatory) out of the market.
And RAND was a subject for a while, but not much any more. In fact, most standards bodies that seem to have any weight haven't bothered - IEEE, ECMA (best standards money can buy!) and ISO. The only two really going hard on Royalty Free that I am aware of are IETF and Khronos. Our own government made a heck of a lot of money off another widely used data communications open standard with a bunch of patents - 802.11 - commonly known as Wifi.
… and yet here I am, sitting in front of a workstation loaded with free software, including a rich set of AV tools which support decode and encode in mp2, mp3 and mp4, for which no royalties have been paid to anyone.
Pure commercial reality, some legal victories by Google, and some reading of the MPEG-LA licensing agreement would answer that question for you.
BTW, MPEG2 (MP3 is just part of MPEG2 standard group) have all the patents expired now in the USA (last MP3 codec patent expired about 18 months ago), so completely royalty free to implement. There's still a handful non-expired but in oddball places like China etc.
So, dragging this back towards the topic again: Can the government mandate open specifications that require royalty payments to implement - yes, despite moralistic wailing otherwise (again, see Digital TV). It is very common. If they wanted to mandate FLARM protocol, then all FLARM has to do is drop into the local ECMA office with a spec, get it rubber stamped and hand it to the government. Simple process that takes no more than about a month and a few grand to do. They could even boot it up to ISO status due to ECMA's preferred vendor status with ISO (See Microsoft Office format) Just add about 2 years to the process if you can buy off enough member countries fast enough.
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