Patent pooling arrangement in cell phone area

A patent pooling agreement has been reached to simplify royalties for mobile phone handsets.

From a story by Laura Rohde of IDG News Service:

A joint patent portfolio licence will operate under the name, the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) DRM 1.0 specification. The participants are: ContentGuard, Intertrust, Matsushita, Philips and Sony. Handset makers will be charged $1 to include the OMA DRM 1.0 standard into a mobile phone, while content owners will pay royalties representing one percent of the consumer selling price of their services.

In a similar previous arrangement, MPEG LA pooled the MPEG-2 patents of nine organisations and began offering a batch licence to all the patents needed to comply with the standard, with the proceeds shared among the patent holders. MPEG LA's pooling approach was approved by the US Department of Justice in 1997 despite charges that they violated antiitrust law.
According to MPEG LA, this latest agreement marks the first time that digital rights patents have been pooled.