MPEG LA’s first meeting of essential HD DVD patent owners, currently consisting of 16 companies, was held in Los Angeles last month for the purpose of creating a joint license providing “fair, reasonable, non-discriminatory access to essential patents,” as an alternative to negotiating separate licenses.

Initial participants include LG Electronics, Microsoft, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, NEC, Samsung, Sanyo, Sonic Solutions, Thomson Licensing, Toshiba, Victor Company of Japan and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment.

“MPEG LA applauds the extraordinary cooperation of so many diverse companies working together to come up with an efficient way for users of the multitude of patents employed in HD DVD devices, discs and related implementations to address their licensing needs,” said MPEG LA CEO Larry Horn. “And the substantial progress made in this initial meeting bodes well for achieving it.”

According to the organization, MPEG LA’s objective is for the license to reflect both relevant conditions in the marketplace and the value of the licensed technology in order to strike a balance between patent users’ interest in reasonable access to this advanced optical disc technology and patent holders’ interest in a reasonable return on their research and development investment that enables a joint license to be offered for the convenience of the marketplace as an alternative to negotiating separate licenses.

Additional patent holder meetings are planned, and work on the joint license will continue. MPEG LA welcomes any party that believes it has patents which are essential to the HD DVD standard to submit them for evaluation of their essentiality by MPEG LA’s patent evaluators and participate in the joint license creation process if determined to be essential.

Further information, along with terms and procedures governing patent submissions, can be found at www.mpegla.com/pid/hddvd/

Story filed 19.10.07