Any entity believing it has a valid patent essential to a normative parts of the MPEG-2 AAC and MPEG-4 Audio Standards, specifically ISO/IEC 13818-7:2006 “Information Technology – Generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information – Part 7: Advanced Audio Coding (AAC);” and ISO/IEC 14496-3:2009 “Information Technology—Coding of audio-visual objects—Part 3: Audio,” specifically limited to the following Profiles and Audio Object Types (AOTs): MPEG-4 AAC Profile (including MPEG-2 AAC LC), MPEG-4 High Efficiency AAC Profile v1 (including MPEG-2 AAC LC in combination with SBR), MPEG-4 High Efficiency AAC Profile v2, MPEG-4 Low Delay AAC Profile, MPEG-4 ER AAC Scalable (AOT 20), MPEG-4 ER AAC ELD (AOT 39) (collectively “AAC Standard”), is invited to submit its patent for determination of essentiality by an independent patent evaluator.
Patents are considered essential when they are determined to have at least one independent claim that would be necessarily and unavoidably infringed (in the absence of a license) by the practice of the AAC Standard.
An evaluation fee of US $10,500 must accompany the submission of each patent, the patent's prosecution history, and copies of all references relied upon by the examining patent office. In addition, an initial submission must be accompanied by a signed letter indicating agreement with the terms and conditions governing the patent submission process.
If informed by the Independent Patent Evaluator that the submitted patent is essential to the AAC Standard, the submitter is expected to participate in the AAC Licensing Committee and the patent licensing program. Such participation will require the payment of a membership fee to help defray the shared costs of the Licensing Committee.
Please contact Via Licensing at submissions@via-la.com to request a copy of the letter describing the submission procedures and the terms and conditions governing the submission of patents for essentiality determination in order to join the AAC licensing program.