“Actually, in most cases, how much money a patent is going to receive is often decided by the brain.†A lawyer told reporters, “Although some textbooks and institutions provide some pricing models for patent fees, some companies Can also come up with some models, but in fact, many situations is to take a 'pained money' to set a model."
Relevant experts believe that, under normal circumstances, the international company’s charging strategy is to charge a small amount of patent fees before a new patented product has been formed, so that the product can quickly form a market size, and then increase the absolute value of sales. Get a large amount of royalties.
In the DVD incident, because there are many companies that have related patents, if the patent fee is to be collected, the patent user must sign an agreement with the patentee one by one. Therefore, these patent rights companies voluntarily formed a patent pool, which is the origin of 6C and 3C. 6C collects royalties from DVD production companies, and then divides them according to the number and importance of patents owned by each patent company. In most cases, because the degree of importance of a patent is difficult to define, it is usually divided according to the number of patents.
In terms of patent fees involved in MP3, the situation is even more complicated. In the MP3 patent, the French Thomson company is one, Philips and France Telecom Group is one. Thomson took his own way to collect royalties, while the latter commissioned two patent agencies to collect royalties on their behalf.
A patent agent introduced that there are many ways to collect royalties. “One is a one-time payment; one is to charge a fee for entry, and then increase in proportion to the economic benefits or output obtained by the patent user in the future, such as the output of DVD, 1 million units, 4 million units and 8 million units. The patent fees that are required to bear are different.†The agent said that there are also profit-sharing, and there is also a kind of buy-out, for example, Microsoft often purchases patents in large quantities. In 1952, Sony Corporation, which had just been established, bought out the transistor patent of Westinghouse, which was still unknown in the United States, and developed the first personal pocket radio.
In the patent fee rate for MPEG4 published by MPEGLA, there are few centralized charging methods. For example, in the use of MPEG4 video encoders, the system can be used up to $100,000 per year or 25 cents per unit, while video takes up to $1 million per year or 25 cents per unit.
In 3G applications, MPEG4 has already introduced detailed royalty collection rules. For example, for the MPEG4 video decoder, there is a 15 cents per bit. In other words, the user pays a patent fee every time he visits, and the cost is related to the data flow of the video. Relevant experts believe that this model will become mainstream in the 3G era where content is the main application, and the resulting royalties will be staggering.