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Media Coding Industry Forum Establishes Work Groups and Hosts Event with Lively Keynote Discussion around Standard Essential Patents
[June 19, 2019]

Media Coding Industry Forum Establishes Work Groups and Hosts Event with Lively Keynote Discussion around Standard Essential Patents


The Media Coding Industry Forum (MC-IF) organized an Asia outreach event in Yokohama, Japan hosted by Sony and Canon (News - Alert). At the event MC-IF announced the establishment of four Work Groups and good progress by active member participation. There was also an introductory presentation of MC-IF in Japanese, a keynote speech by Professor Toshifumi Futamata, and Work Group sessions for some of the MC-IF Work Groups. The event was held in the Landmark Tower in Yokohama, conveniently accessible for representatives attending the Licensing Executives Society International (LESI) annual conference. The Yokohama meeting had a good mixture of existing and prospective new members, with a full room of almost 60 attendees from more than 30 different organizations.

One of the highlights of the day was the keynote speech by Professor Toshifumi Futamata, Visiting Senior Researcher, Institute for Future Initiatives (IFI), the University of Tokyo. The speech was entitled "Latest development of SEPs - Observation from Japanese Perspective" and provided a good overview of many of the recent court cases that have involved Standard Essential Patents (SEPs). Professor Futamata noted the problems of transparency and predictability in the SEP licensing environment. He also discussed the Japanese Patent Office's "Guide to Licensing Negotiations Involving Standard Essential Patents" -- an attept to address SEP rate calculation and the interplay of fair reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) obligations and injunctive relief.



The afternoon session consisted of Work Group (WG) sessions by the Intellectual Property (IP) Ecosystem WG and the Marketing and Outreach WG. Charters for these two WGs, along with the Profiling WG and the Implementation & Interoperability WG, have now been approved and chairs for each WG appointed.

The next major MC-IF event is planned to be held around IBC in Amsterdam, Netherlands, in September 2019. For more information, or to join the discussion and become a member of MC-IF, go to www.mc-if.org


About MC-IF

The Media Coding Industry Forum was formed and announced at IBC in Amsterdam in September 2018 and has since held meetings in Macau, China and Sunnyvale, CA (News - Alert) in the US. One of the goals of the MC-IF is to facilitate cross-industry discussions around the non-technical aspects of deployment of media coding standards, including patent licensing. MC-IF also serves as a hub for information related to implementations, tools, and guidelines for MPEG standards. Membership includes major codec implementers and codec providers, as well as patent licensing entities and licensors.

MC-IF is an open international forum that works on the non-technical aspects of deployment of media coding standards, including issues related to licensing. Member companies / organizations include Apple, Ateme (News - Alert), b<>com, Bitmovin, CableLabs, Canon, Divideon, Dolby, Ericsson, ETRI, Fraunhofer, Harmonic, HEVC Advance, Intel, InterDigital, Mitsubishi, Netint, NGCodec, Nokia, Ocean Tomo, OP Solutions, Orange, Sisvel, Sony, Technicolor (News - Alert), Tencent, Unified Patents, Velos Media, and Zetacast. For more information, visit www.mc-if.org.


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