Remember the deal you made with the smart kid in school where he would let you cheat off his test and you would promise not to steal his lunch money? Samsung and Microsoft's just gone and done the same thing, except in their case they both fight for the nerd spot and the bully position goes empty. The two companies agreed to a deal that lets each other have access to patents for "computers, televisions, digital video recorders and digital media players."
With Microsoft venturing into Zune and Zunephone territory, it's interesting to see what this deal will do to help speed up development of the two products this year. Since Zune 1.0 was basically cribbed off Toshiba, and since Microsoft really wants to step things up with the 2nd generation, having Samsung's experience in the phone and digital music player market will really help out their chances.
Samsung, Microsoft strike patent deal [Yahoo]
DISCUSSION
No, this is mostly about WMV. Now that VC-1 has been exposed and its an mpegla standard, it's known that Samsung has more patents in the codec than Microsoft.
See VC-1 patent list - http://www.mpegla.com/vc1/vc-1-att1.…
This is important because Microsoft is selling WMV much cheaper than mpegla is selling VC-1. So now Microsoft has to pay the fees that its WMV licensees aren't paying. Instead of dealing directly with mpegla, they are going to each patent holder and quietly creating deals.
The big question is how MS is going to handle distribution: they don't charge to distribute WMV (so they probably don't audit there own licensees distributions), but there are fees for VC-1. Of course, Microsoft exempts itself from all meaning meaningful indemnification in their WMV license.... So many MS is hanging its licensees out to dry.