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Sigma Designs Accused of Copyright Infringement

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the vengeance-is-mine-saith-the-horde dept.

Cygnus v1 writes "The XVID team has ceased development of the XVID video codec for the time being because they say that Sigma Designs' REALmagic MPEG-4 Video Codec software includes their code and has claimed it as Sigma Designs' own work. The current XVID homepage includes some binary-level comparisons." Update: 08/23 03:14 GMT by T : Apparently the folks at Sigma have seen that no good is likely to come from this; an anonymous reader submits a link to this release on Yahoo! which says "complete source code will be available for download starting August 23, free of charge, through Sigma's website."

3 of 417 comments (clear)

  1. Re:GPL Powerless by Bonker · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Tell that to Avery Lee who got his code stolen. The FSF was very helpful in forcing the individuals who stole it to comply with GNU terms.

    Being that Xvid is a larger project than Virtual Dub, I would be highly surprised to not see the FSF step in at some point.

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  2. Sony and SN Systems copied GCC for PlayStation by Myria · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In the early days of the original PlayStation, Sony and SN Systems took GCC and modified it to become a compiler for PlayStation. However, SN Systems made a number of additional modifications, such as by adding dongle-based copy protection to protect "their" work. This crap finally stopped a few years later when game developers complained and Richard Stallman got involved. This incident is rarely heard about because PSX game development was under NDA. However, an NDA that covers GCC is illegal, because it would restrict the rights of the next user to copy GCC (thus automatically revoking Sony's right to copy GCC). The PlayStation 2 compiler is now distributed with clear notice that the GCC and binutils portions are under GPL and not covered by the NDA. They also come with source code. They are in fact the same source tree for professional developers as the GCC used in PS2 Linux. myria

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  3. Re:Sue them - I agree, for all copyright violation by Sancho · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Check this thread out , though:
    http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=& threadid= 32015

    Specifically:
    I spoke to a manager at Sigma Designs over the phone a couple weeks ago, and he basically verified the accusation - a programmer "mistakenly" based their MPEG-4 codec around XviD, added a few patches, changed the interface (but not by much), then released it as their own. We were informed that they were replacing all GPL'ed code with their own, to avoid a licensing problem (even though copyright infringement had already occurred, of course).

    After that, version 1.1 came out, which was a complete slap in the face. Supposedly "rewritten", it was nothing but a different checkout of XviD with a few registers changed and some code reordered.

    Should be an interesting few days.

    -h