I think there's a communication gap here. Let me try to explain with some made up numbers.
Lets say Microsoft pays the MPEG-LA $50 million/year and gets back $2 million/yr for their patents. So net payment to MPEG-LA is $48 mil/yr.
But MPEG-LA has a LOT of other licensees like Apple that licenses it for Quicktime, iMovie, all OS X and iOS devices, Google for YouTube, Adobe for Flash etc. etc. Lets say they all pay them $452 mil/yr. So total revenue of the MPEG-LA is $500mil/yr but Microsoft's share is not disproportionately large in that number.
I don't know about MS's share in MPEG-LA's revenues, all I stated was that they paid them more than what they got back in licenses.
Yeah, this is a communication issue. When I said "disproportionately", you apparently heard something like "predominately". But that's not what I meant.
The point is that MSFT might pay more into the MPEG-LA than it gets precisely so it can influence the MPEG-LA to take actions that are beneficial to Microsoft's other business interests. You are apparently trying to take that same fact and argue in the opposite direction, and I don't think the logic works that way.
>The point is that MSFT might pay more into the MPEG-LA than it gets precisely so it can influence the MPEG-LA to take actions that are beneficial to Microsoft's other business interests.
I don't see how it's Microsoft's choice to pay more or less. The terms are pretty clear and the same for all.
I also don't see how paying more will allow it to have more influence on the MPEG-LA, they're more like a customer. That's a pretty torturous argument to make.
MPEG-LA needs to keep Microsoft as a customer. Your biggest customer often has more influence on your business model than your smallest customer. If Microsoft can show they are willing to make moves to no longer be a customer of MPEG-LA, MPEG-LA will make moves to show that Microsoft should continue to be a customer.
