Building One Centralized WiMax Tollbooth

from the pay-up,-everyone dept

Now that there seems to be a lot more skepticism about WiMax (despite a mostly positive prediction today from the Yankee Group about WiMax's potential), it looks like some are trying to deal with some of the more pressing issues holding back WiMax. A big one, which we've been discussing for a while, is that there are a few companies out there who have been threatening to go after WiMax players over patents. While some still question whether or not the patents are valid in the first place, the fact that these questions are being raised has some companies worried about what they'd be in for if they got into the WiMax business. To help settle this, Via Licensing is trying to get all the WiMax patent folks to agree to let Via be the central patenting tollbooth for all WiMax. That is, they're hoping to pool all the various WiMax patents, so companies can pay up a single fee and not have to worry about licensing any more. Of course, this goes against what folks like Tim Berners-Lee have been saying -- that for standards to really be promoted, they shouldn't require any patent licensing.

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