Of course you have to pay the licensing fee of $15.000 and this will sure keep a lot of the Taiwanese companies out of this promising marchitecture.
Some of them want to use and have paid the licensing fees as the people in Japan really wants the graphic cards and the motherboards with HDMI on it. It is an easy way to drive audio and video via single cable, nothing more than that.
The second problem is the silicon image chip as you just cannot get enough of those and you need it to be HDCP compliant. ยต