> Instead, people want to capitalize on someone else's hard work for free.

This would only make sense if there _wasn't_ free video standards competing with HDMI. How is it that one group managed to do this for free yet the other group charges clearly exorbitant rates for a nearly equivalent product.

> They own IP.

That isn't nearly as valuable as they say it is. They only do this to prevent piracy and not to promote any useful technical standard.

> People want to use that IP.

People are _forced_ to because the same group practically gives away their technology under certain conditions so their connectors get added to nearly every extant device. I don't _want_ to use HDMI. I'm simply _forced_ to through market manipulation.

> want to make money.

Selling drugs would earn them more money. Why don't we tolerate that? It could be, under some torturous logic, be just another "standard business practice." In fact looking at our laws I see tons of "standard business practices" that are now flatly illegal.

The law is a tool. It can be changed. It should be changed. The citizens pay for 85% of it and while businesses only pay 7%. Why do their "standard practices" hold a candle to the "needs of the citizens."

It all stems from the companies behind the HDMI authority. It's basically all of the major AV device makers circa early 2000s. They wrote the spec and added it to all of their products. Displayport wasn't around just yet so HDMI just beat it to market. Since everyone needed an HDMI thing to go with their HDMI thing, everyone else jumped on the HDMI bandwagon. Although I'm really not sure how HDMI managed to get it's way into PCs. Displayport should have just cornered the entire market, it's very popular on business-class machines. I'm guessing it's because of HTPCs and people wanting to put big TVs on their PCs is what led to the adoption.

Same thing applies to PCI. I can get USB specs for free from USB-IF. But the PCI and PCIe specs cost $4000 plus. Just so I can write my own PCI driver. Legally, I mean. Oh, there is external references, but what if I want the authoritative documentation? Should I have to pay thousands and thousands for access (!) to a standard that is ubiquitous in every sense of the word? There is, to me, a point at which ubiquity trumps any "IP rights" the standards org would have.

What free video standards are competing with HDMI? DisplayPort has its own patent pool.