Mark Schubin wrote: > > - Warren Communications News reported earlier this week that LG announced Monday 8-VSB license deals with five more companies (Enseco, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Jabril, and Orion). Only three other have previously be announced (Mitsubishi, Sharp, and Toshiba). > Notably absent are such giants as Matsushita (Panasonic), Philips, Samsung, Sony, and Thomson. An industry source has told me that (not counting Samsung) those companies consider their intellectual property in digital TVs to be comparable to LG's and, therefore, don't see a need for a license agreement. A U.S. patent issued in 1992 has a life of 17 years, meaning that patent will expire a week before the latest date for analog cutoff in the U.S. An 8-justice majority of the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that "a patentee's use of a royalty agreement that projects beyond the expiration date of the patent is unlawful per se". ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.