It seems like Apple believes so much in its new nano-SIM that it’s prepared to offer a royalty-free license to any patents essential to the creation and implementation of their nano-SIM technology.
According to Florian Mueller over at FOSS Patents:
A perfectly reliable source that I can’t disclose has shown me a letter dated March 19, 2012 that a senior Apple lawyer sent to ETSI. The letter addresses the primary concern of critics of the proposal. The FT said that “the Apple-led proposal has caused some concern among its rivals that the US group might eventually own the patents”. But Apple’s letter has removed this roadblock, if it ever was any, through an unequivocal commitment to grant royalty-free licenses to any Apple patents essential to nano-SIM, provided that Apple’s proposal is adopted as a standard and that all other patent holders accept the same terms in accordance with the principle of reciprocity.
The nano-SIM design would easily free up space for more memory, bigger batteries, and it would let vendors create even thinner devices. The current micro-SIM setup takes up 30 percent more space than the nano-SIM would, and card thickness would shirnk about 15 percent in the new nano-SIM. Compared to the even more ubiquitous traditional SIM cards, there would be a total space savings of about 60 percent. Any company standing in the way of a nano-SIM card is just being asinine at this point, especially if Apple completely removes licensing barriers for the technology.
Via: FOSS Patents