I wouldn't count on any comments, constructive or otherwise, affecting Apple's case with MPEG LA. A quick perusal of
their site shows what kind of company this is. MPEG LA is not a technology company. MPEG LA is a new, almost inevitable breed of company which has gotten its first real foothold in the media industry.
MPEG LA is a parasite company. Run by lawyers pretending to be technologists, a parasite company exists not to provide products and services, but to obstruct others from doing so in a particular industry. They do this by collecting patents, charging royalties, and suing as many people as they can. Of course they couch this in language about how they provide convenience to their clients (by allowing them to funnel all their royalty dollars to one convenient location).
Observe also the website for
1394 LA. This is a totally separate company, staffed by the EXACT SAME PEOPLE, but for Firewire instead of MPEG. The language used in press releases makes it sound as if the technological innovators in an industry came together in a spirit of goodwill to form a company for licensing their respective intellectual property claims. If a group of MPEG patentholders formed a licensing consortium, and a group of Firewire patentholders independently formed their own similar consortium, you wouldn't expect them to be managed by the same company. But here you go. (Of course, Apple is one of the major IP holders in the IEEE 1394 arena).
On the contrary, what you have here is a company which paints itself to consumers as being a direct cooperative venture between the companies whose patents they manage, but has a very different face which they show to patentholders. To them, the company is a licensing (and litigation) service provider for a given technology. In an interview, one of MPEG LA's execs said that MPEG LA would not be heavy handed, and would not sue people who chose not to pay the royalties, though he could not guarantee that the patentholders themselves would not. What this actually means is, if you violate patents in MPEG LA's patent pool, the lawyers backing MPEG LA (not MPEG LA itself, mind you) will sue your pants off, "on behalf" of the patentholder.
To sum up, what you have are lawyers who position themselves directly in the cash stream between technology providers and consumers, and suck in cash from every direction while providing little real service. Restricting themselves to multiple little atomic front companies, each dedicated to its own technology, is a brilliant stroke, because generalized patent poolling is a violation of antitrust laws, at least until the lawyers successfully lobby to remove that restriction.
