Sorenson Countersues Apple

pinqkandi writes "MacCentral is reporting that Sorenson Media is countersuing Apple over a lawsuit Apple initiated in April claiming they have exclusive rights to Sorenson's codec. Sorenson, claiming Apple's lawsuit against them has severly hurt business, is seeking judgement against Apple in compensation. Apple originally brought on their lawsuit when Sorenson teamed up with Macromedia for Flash MX. Looks like good old Steve is back to his old self :-)"

Comments

Re:unresearched

[gwernol]

"Good old Steve" is in reference to the litigation-happy days when Jobs was CEO of Apple in the 80's, suing Microsoft, Adobe, and everyone else who displeased him.

Unfortunately that's factually incorrect. Apple sued Microsoft in 1988, four years after Steve was kicked out of Apple. In fact he was sued by Apple the year after he left in 1985: see this. So the Apple-Microsoft suit had nothing to do with Mr. Jobs. Whatever his faults he doesn't seem to be particularly litigous.

Re:Oh boo hoo hoo!

[scrod]

Er, yeah they do.

Today I received a polite phone call from a fellow at Microsoft who works in the Windows Media group. He informed me that Microsoft has intellectual property rights on the ASF format and told me that, although I had reverse engineered it, the implementation was still illegal since it infringed on Microsoft patents. I have asked for the specific patent numbers, since I find patenting a file format a bit strange. At his request, and much to my own sadness, I have removed support for ASF in VirtualDub 1.3d, since I cannot risk a legal confrontation. This unfortunately means that I can no longer redistribute versions of VirtualDub older than V1.3d.

Just the facts, man

[marxmarv]

I wasn't surprised to read that an old version of Sorenson had been cracked. How long can it be until the latest versions are too?

You didn't read the thread well enough. Someone did in fact crack SVQ3 but refused to release it with their own name on it, and several folks advised them to release it anonymously, ala the RC4-compatible arcfour module. (Oh, that was a fun Usenet thread)

And what will that mean for the lawsuits?

The most curious thing about that whole thread was a marketing manager for Sorenson posting a note that they don't mind the use of their file formats if it's done in an approved fashion or some such rot, and recommended holding off for the next 30-60 days pending certain announcements. I think it was moderated up to 2, so I had to have been really bored to find it.

If I was going to create a closed codec, I'd make damn sure there were players for pretty much every platform out there. I'd make high quality players for Windows, Linux and maybe the Mac, and then a library for everybody else so people can write their own players if they need to.

Yeah, but you're a /. weenie and probably wouldn't create a binary-only codec anyway. Besides SVQ1 wasn't much more than H.323 with a slightly tricky codebook and some obligatory scrambling in an attempt to keep people out.

Otherwise, the moment good content gets encoded using it, by by secrects.

It took something like two years (+/- 50%) for SVQ1 to be cracked, and slightly less time for SVQ3. The QDomain music codec remains imprisoned, and without that no one's going to watch QT trailers on Linux.

-jhp

Re:Video in Flash

[PCM2]

The original suite(sp?) was because Apple was terrified that FlashMX producers would use it it to make video using the Sorenson spark codec. The fear is justified because just about everybody has the Flash plug-in and far fewer have the QuickTime plug-In.

Not really. The way Macromedia people have described it to me, the Spark codec really works best for things like talking heads, webcams and the like. Nobody expects anyone to use Flash to stream first-run feature films. Another big benefit of the Spark codec for Macromedia is that it's TINY ... something like 100K. Keeping the size of the Flash plug-in small is one of their top priorities.

My opinion is that Apple is sometimes just plain dumb. If they had just bothered to include the Spark codec in the QuickTime6 engine then everything would have been fine: Video makers and web developers will not go to the extra lengths of having to embed the video in a Flash movie (Time is money!)

Again, not quite accurate. Flash has much greater market penetration than QuickTime. And it's not as easy to build applications for streaming video with QuickTime as with Flash...