RE: FCC Orders All TV's To Have Digital Tuners By 2007

[Garrett Wollman <wollman@lcs.mit.edu>]

<<On Fri, 9 Aug 2002 13:53:59 -0400, "Hakim Madjid" <HMadjid@mindspring.com> said:

> As far as patent royalties go, I'm not sure how much of a factor that
> can be given a large enough economy of scale. Right now, a decent DVD
> player can be bought for under $200.

The royalties for most of these patents are specified as x% of either
wholesale or retail price.  (That's not counting all of the patent
licenses that are required to actually create the programming, which
are either one-offs borne by the content producers, or specified as a
fee per use.  E.g., someone encoding a DVD has to pay for a bunch of
patents to use the encoding software, and then has to pay per-disc
patent royalties as well.)

-GAWollman