Patent pools have been tried so many times in the cellular world that it seems unlikely they will ever take off. In the early days of LTE, there were no fewer than three different 4G pools, but none of them gained much traction, because they did not attract enough of the companies which control the lion’s share of the patents. For 5G, a new approach to IPR licensing seems inevitable (although some people said that about 4G), but it may rely more on open source norms converging with reinterpreted FRAND (fair reasonable and non-discriminatory) rules, as used by standards organizations like ETSI. Undeterred, one of those 4G patent pool operators is still soldiering on. VIA Licensing, a subsidiary of Dolby, …