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Ogg Vorbis Update: Thomson Trouble
3.1415926535 writes: "In this article on C|Net,
Thompson Multimedia's vice president of new business Henri Linde openly threatens the Vorbis project. The quote is, 'We doubt very much that they are not using Fraunhofer and Thomson intellectual property. We think it is likely they are infringing.'"
Considering
Ogg Vorbis
is GPL, you'd think they'd already know.
There is a positive. At this point, while the Open Source community is quite supportive of this technology, the majority of the world is still fixated on MP3.
Likely, the lawsuit will be dismissed, or at least won by Ogg Vorbis, but the damage to MP3 will be that Ogg Vorbis will suddenly be well known to people who aren't neccessarily going to hear about it in the community.
It's free advertising via a nuisance lawsuit... sounds like a case of "Any publicity is good publicity to me." (Excuse the cliche)
----------------- "I have a bone to pick, and a few to break." - Refused -------------------
Ogg can't chain me to my computer or even to a PDA and expect to thrive. Ogg should spend some time bringing their codec to the typical embedded A/V processors found in the new generation of cheap OEM DVD and CD chipsets for consumer electronics (like the ESS VideoDrive 4308 and 4318, found in most of the DVD/VCD/MP3 combo players)
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
I think the point was not "being GPL will give it some kind of special legal protection" but "if they were competent, and they thought it was infringing, they'd just download the source and figure it out themselves." Clearly, being GPL doesn't mean much- the license itself has not even been significantly tested in court. But it does lend a layer of transparency to the project that makes these types of threats both more irritating in their bluster and arrogance and more pathetic in their ignorance.
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
"This is what hardball is like" is what their representative said. Essentially, it's plutocracy as normal.
The Claims are a series of mostly concentric circles. The outer ones are going to be very broad and will almost always have prior art against them. Inner ones will be progressively more specific. So the first thing is to look at the published state of the art before the patents were applied for and decide which of the Claims are actually real. Then you can look at Ogg/Vorbis and see if any of those Claims cover their work.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Troll. Your mama would spank you.
I was never a VQF developer. One of my professors in Japan, Sadoaki Furui, is head of NTT Human Interfaces lab, which developed the original VQF, then called TwinVQ. The fact that we knew each other was the limit of the overlap (and we met exactly because we both worked in compression).
Any technical commonality (there is some) is coincidental. Both TwinVQ and Vorbis draw more from speech encoding technology than mp3 does.
(Incidentally, VQF has noise problems because of the way the lossy/nonuniform vector quantization interleaves MDCT scalars. Vorbis works differently).
Vorbis was never a 'limited hack of VQF'. Please, *do* go inspect the original CVS snapshots as well as the previous generations of Xiph.org codecs, Squish, '95' and Stormbringer, all of which predate TwinVQ.
But, eh, I just fell for arguing eith a fool. Now I feel all dirty.
Monty
Ogg is and always has been under Xiphophorus, a registered S-corporation in Somerville, Massachusetts. Xiphophorus holds all the copyrights.
Xiph.org would be the target, not any contributors.
Monty
Of course, since patents now last 17 years, and are awarded for things that could never have been protected by being trade secrets (One-click, anyone?), or for that matter even required R&D, the situation is ridiculous.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I'm not totally happy with these items--none seem as obvious as the mp3/.gif examples. Oh well, it goes to show that there is an important difference between free and Free.
So let me get this straight. We have patents so people won't use existing technology, and instead will have incentive to create new solutions to problems. Now patents are used to make sure new technologies DON'T appear. When did this huge disconnect come about?
You have to wonder if either the submitter or the editors actually read this article.
Sure, Thompson Multimedia is doing some entirely predictable sabre-rattling. Anybody who didn't see that coming a mile off should see an optometrist.
The important thing mentioned in there is that CMGI has pulled the plug on Vorbis development. That's a far more important, and ominous development. Corporate backing was allowing progress to be made very quickly on Vorbis, and will be critical when the inevitable patent infringement suit comes. If someone else with deep pockets doesn't step in soon, we can just resign ourselves to paying Frauenhoffer's license fees for the forseeable future.
(And please, let's not delude ourselves that the mythical Open Source Community will magically step in and finish the project: enthusiasm and spirit are no replacement for in-depth knowledge of signal processing.)
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
> It's actually quite likely that Vorbis infringes on several of Fraunhoffer/Thompson's patents
Actually, no. Monty, Xiphophorus, and iCast did their homework, and also hired some clueful technology IP lawyers to look things over, some of whom I've met -- these guys are sharp, and they grok psychoacoustics.
Have you read the actual patents? If you work out exactly what is being claimed, FhG doesn't actually own the farm, as I've heard it told.
Yeah, I was skeptical too, but I've been convinced.
Note, also, this: FhG has never actually claimed any infringement by Vorbis. FhG's lawyers could certainly read the source if they wanted to know.
Or maybe they have a patent on "A method of compressing audio to preserve quality but reduce space usage.
Well according to this patent, obtained by Thompson for his "invention", that may be exactly what they claim. The patent would seem to cover any audio compression method that converts from time domain to frequency domain, does quantization, then entropy coding.
The other Fraunhofer patent is at least a bit more focused, and specifies a breakdown into frequency groups, followed by quantization, then compression. The Ogg Vorbis scheme avoids the first stage of prefiltering into smaller frequency bands, and does the transform in one feel swoop. This requires more work for the transform, but arguably gives better results.
In short, the first patent I mentioned seems difficult to defend against, unless it can be shown to be overly broad or invalid. The second is exactly what Ogg Vorbis was avoiding.
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
From this url given elsewhere by another poster, I looked up all the patents that Thomson Multimedia and Fraunhofer have in the US (apparently some weren't approved in US but in other countries). With all the hub-ub about overbroad/silly patents I thought I could go read some in more detail. The list of patten numbers is:
- 5,742,735
- 5,455,833
- 5,579,430
- 5,559,834
- 5,703,999
- 5,706,309
- 5,736,943
- 5,701,346
- 4,942,607
- 5,214,742
- 5,227,990
- 5,384,811
- 5,321,729
- 4,821,260
(You can look up any of them at the patent office. Just enter all the numbers in the search field separated by spaces.)Some interesting things I noted:
- Although the invention has been described and illustrated in detail, it is to be clearly understood that the same is by way of illustration and example, and is not to be taken by way of limitation. The spirit and scope of the present invention are to be limited only by the terms of the appended claims.
Since most of the patents I found did not specify that the encoded signal had to be audio, this seems like they have a patent on any use of whatever their algorithms are trying to do (which I found not very clear...) In other words, it is almost like somebody patented a specific hash table function (I'm sure someone has) and then patented it specifically for application X, but didn't rule out the possibility of "owning" it in any application that uses hash functions.All of the above must be taken with at grain of salt because the legal-ese in the patents (especially the beginnings where the claims are listed) is very weird and I had trouble deciphering what kind of math they were getting at. Not to mention one could spend days if not weeks reading them all and all supplemental material. Overall it looks like Ogg would have to include some very specific algorithms to be infringing (unless just the fact that the patents claim to patent one method of doing a certain type/part of encoding signals is enough to claim infringement--i.e. one form of encoding algorithm counts as owning them all...but that doesn't seem very reasonable.)
Rachael
"Go Forth Ye Lemmings and Propagate"
Linde said what he said only because it was an opportunity for some free FUD. Between the lines, it says, "we're worried/scared, they're on our radar, and we need to make some noise. Words are cheaper than lawyers."
Big surprise.
If Slashdotters didn't expect that already, well, shame on you. Sudden worried speculation about Fraunhofer's and Thomson's 'newly ominous tone' is just the snowball they'd like to start (while pressing full-steam ahead with the new webcast and download licensing). I'd be annoyed if they managed to start it with a single public sentence (we've known they didn't like us for quite a while in private). Let's not be a herd of sheep being maneuvered into the chute.
Thomson and FhG both have a reputation of a loud bark, but tend to pursue relatively little litigation in practice and they'll have to work hard to find basis against Xiphophorus. When we did our patent review, we focused on the FhG/Thomson MPEG patents. Our counsel advises us we don't infringe, what we knew already.
In other words, nothing's changed from yesterday except that Linde has decided to bluff before the call.
Monty
Don't attack Eric for telling what he sees to be the truth. That's his job.
Behind the scenes, he's a friend of the Ogg project and has been for some time. He's doing his job by calling it how he sees it, and we don't ask him to spin the facts toward our favor. He also doesn't have control over which quote a reporter will choose.
Monty
These delayed-action patent issues are becoming predictable. The community ought to keep its collective eyes out for this in the future. While not exactly the same, the similarities are striking:
We should all be experienced enough with this phenomenon to see it coming a mile away. From this perspective, things like Windows Media are not competitors to mp3, they are just different complainants in the patent lawsuits.
I strenuously suggest people use png, .ogg, and anything other technology that isn't trying to strangle open standards.
The Internet wouldn't have existed if they played by these rules at the beginning.
Steve