MPEG LA held in New York the fourth meeting of essential Blu-ray Disc patent owners - currently consisting of 18 companies - for the purpose of creating a joint license providing fair, reasonable, non-discriminatory access to essential patents, as an alternative to negotiating separate licenses.

Significant progress has been made in identifying licensing terms for Blu-ray Disc products such as players, recorders, drives, software, recordable discs and prerecorded discs, says MPEG LA.

Participating companies include CyberLink, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, Philips, LG, Matsushita (Panasonic), Mitsubishi, Pioneer, Samsung, Sanyo, Sharp, Sonic Solutions, Sony, TDK, Victor Company of Japan and Warner Home Video.

“The participation of this group of diverse companies in the development of a joint license bodes well for offering an efficient way to address intellectual property licensing needs for advanced optical devices, discs and related implementations,” said MPEG LA CEO Larry Horn.

Additional patent holder meetings are planned, and work on the joint license will continue. Meanwhile, MPEG LA welcomes additional owners of essential patents to participate in the creation of a joint patent license for the benefit of the marketplace.

Any party that believes it has patents that are essential to the Blu-ray Disc standard and wishes to join the Blu-ray Disc Patent Portfolio License is invited to submit them for evaluation of their essentiality to the standard by MPEG LA’s patent evaluators. Further information, along with terms and procedures governing patent submissions, can be found at http://www.mpeg(...)com/pid/bluray/.

Story filed 25.02.07