The problems this highlights aren't going to go away either unless we (and the US especially) change the way we handle patents. More and more "open standards" rely on patents that are starting to look like time-bombs to us and hidden treasure to companies who own (or have acquired) the patents. MPEG-4 was so encumbered by licensing issues that while it's been "out" and finished for more than three years, no products used it because they couldn't figure out a cost-effective way of implementing it. Now it's 3 years behind competing products like Sorenson 3 (and DivX, now that it's getting legitimate customers and not just sweaty DVD ripping nerd-childs) and its video quality is sorely lacking. But what if MPEG-LA had just sat on the licensing fees for a few years and then started charging? What if Microsoft decides tomorrow that since it owns patents on NTFS, (V)FAT(12/16/32), it can kill off competition from Mac and Linux by charging royalties for implementations of code that reads those filesystems? What if some relic of the dark ages rears his ugly head up next week and demands royalties for internal combustion engines? Will we all be willing to pay more for cars?