Sigma Designs Accused of Copyright Infringement

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."

Comments

press release text

[Anonymous Coward]

XVID TEAM REQUESTS SIGMA DESIGNS' TO HALT COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT

ERLANGEN, GERMANY -- August 22nd, 2002 -- The XVID development team, author of the popular XVID MPEG-4 video codec, claims that Sigma Designs' REALmagic MPEG-4 Video Codec is an illegal copy of the XVID software and publicly requests the company to stop violating their software license and copyrights.

XVID is a leading open source MPEG-4 video research project: software distributed by XVID is covered by a Free Software license, the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL). The XVID team announced that Sigma Designs' REALmagic MPEG-4 Video Codec includes wide portions of XVIDcodec software. By not offering a corresponding source code distribution and by claiming sole authorship on the product, Sigma Designs' Inc. is violating the GNU General Public License and the copyrights of the XVID authors.

XVID learned about the license violation in early July, soon after the initial release of the REALmagic software (version 1.0). Sigma Designs' were immediately contacted, and replied confirming the violation and promising to replace all violating code.

Version 1.1 of the REALmagic software was released on the 9th of August. After examining the new version, XVID developers concluded that the violating code was not replaced, but disguised by programming and compiling tricks. Sigma Designs' were again contacted and asked to remove the REALmagic download link from their website. Thus far, they have not shown any sign of cooperation.

In a statement to the XVID development team, project founder Michael Militzer showed his disappointment regarding Sigma Designs' behaviour: "We have been quite reasonable and have given Sigma Designs' ample opportunity to resolve this issue. Apparently none of our demands have been taken seriously. Nearly two months after the initial release of the REALmagic MPEG-4 Video Codec, Sigma Designs' is still knowingly infringing the GNU General Public License."

Militzer believes this infringement might be of high general interest: "This is an unfortunate event, not only for us but for the whole Free Software movement. Therefore we hope to receive wide support from the Free Software community in our efforts to convince Sigma Designs' to respect the terms of the GPL."

Evidence supporting the claim has been published on the XVID website.

http://www.xvid.org/v1_0_comparison.pdf
http:// www.xvid.org/v1_1_comparison.pdf

About XVID (http://www.xvid.org/)
XVID is a leading open source MPEG-4 video research project, founded by the German student Michael Militzer in August 2001 to continue the efforts of DivXNetworks' former OpenDivX project. Today, the XVID project consists of users and developers from all over the world. XVID publishes all its software under the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL).

About Sigma Designs Inc. (http://www.sigmadesigns.com/)
Sigma Designs' headquarters are located in Milpitas, California. The company specializes in MPEG based video hardware for encoding and decoding. Recently Sigma Designs' introduced the Xcard, the first consumer hardware MPEG-4 decoder in the form of a personal computer add-on card.

About GNU GPL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html)
The GNU General Public License is the most frequently used software license for Free Software development and is supported by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Software distributed under the GNU GPL grants everyone modification and redistribution rights, on the condition that derived or redistributed software carries the same license.

Contacts

For contacting the XVID team please use the e-mail addresses contact@xvid.org or contact@xvid.de

Please address your request to one of the following persons:

Daniel Smith (USA)
Michael Militzer (Germany and international)
Christoph Lampert (Germany and international)
Edouard Gomez (France)

As someone who once worked for Sigma Designs...

[StevenMaurer]

...all I can say is that I'm not one bit surprised. Many companies are morally flawed somehow, but not all of them revel in it quite so obviously.

Re:As someone who once worked for Sigma Designs...

[StevenMaurer]

It wouldn't work. This is a case of civil copyright infringement, not the penalty phase of a felony conviction.

What the XVid folks really need is some sugar-daddy corporation (FSF, IBM, anyone?) to fund their legal costs going after SD.

But before they do even that, I'd suggest the XVid people just tell Sigma Designs that if they don't conform to the GNU Public License, they'll start contacting their distributors to tell them about the situation - and that they're selling products in violation of someone's copyright.

Believe me when I say that Sigma Designs will fold like a house of cards if they do that. At one time they had such a bad reputation with distributors, they had a terrible time just getting their products out on the shelves. Assuming little has changed (and this episode convinces me it hasn't) it wouldn't take much to have them get dropped completely. And that would hurt them where it hurts the most - in the pocketbook.

Re:As someone who once worked for Sigma Designs...

[JoeShmoe]

I agree. My first experience with Sigma Designs was consulting for a company and finding out they were purchasing MPEG-1 decoder cards for $200 a pop to play training videos.

This was in 1998. Well after software-based codecs were freely available (Microsoft shipped ActiveMovie with MPEG-1 playback support back when it released Internet Explorer 3.0 somewhere around 1995? 96?)

I did a demo for the deparment head showing two systems side-by-side, one with Signa's REALMagic card and their codec, and the other with Windows Media Player installed. Ironically, the guy picked the software based solution as the "higher quality" solution and said it was worth the extra $200.

Needless to say, when the labels were revealed, they immediately cancelled the pending order for 6000 REALMagic cards, a savings of $300,000.

Sigma Designs seems like a bunch of snakeoil salesmen to me.

- JoeShmoe

.

I'm not surprised

[IamTheRealMike]

If this is true, it doesn't surprise me at all. It was only ever going to be a matter of time before a corp violated the GPL. I mean, there's a huge amount of free code out there - if you're looking at what would be for your project 6 months work right in front of you, ready to use, the temptation just to "accidentally" include it must be tremendous.

It's easy to think, who would ever know? Comparing binary compiles is a good way of testing, but it's not 100% proof. It's damn close, but would a judge know that?

Most interesting of all, will the FSF actually do what it always said it'd do, and protect this GPLd software? And will the GPL stand up in court? IANAL, but I don't see any reason why it shouldn't. This sort of thing needs to be dealt with swiftly however, lest other companies get the idea that it's OK.

Re:GPL Powerless

[gorilla]

if someone infringes upon it, they can just ignore your complaints and take an 'so sue me' attitude.

They can do this for any license, including one where you only release binaries (I've seen at least one instance where the only difference between two programs is that one had the startup messages patched to display a different message).

Any Questions?

[SloWave]

SIGMA DESIGNS TO HOLD SECOND QUARTER CONFERENCE CALL

MILPITAS, CA, (August 12, 2002) - Sigma Designs (NASDAQ: SIGM), a leader in digital decoder solutions, announced today that the Company will be discussing second quarter results during a conference call on Tuesday, August 27, 2002, at 4:45 p.m. Eastern time. The dial-in number is (612) 332-0226. A question and answer period will take place at the end of the discussion. The earnings release will cross the wire at the close of market on the same day.

The call will be webcast live from www.vcall.com. An audio replay of the call will be available shortly thereafter the same day and will remain on-line for 30 days. For further information, please see the link to this site on our website at www.sigmadesigns.com or email investor relations at IR@sdesigns.com.

Re:GPL Powerless

[Bonker]

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.

Re:No, use corporation speak instead

[marcop]

Why not just call them a bunch of pirates, as Disney, RIAA, MPAA, etc. call individuals who allegedly are involved in copyright infringement. Then the developers can claim "X" dollars lost and say how their children, pets, etc. are starving because of piracy.

Re:Anybody else notice...

[NanoGator]

"Anybody else notice...that XVID is DIVX backwards?"

Nice DMCA violation there. Heh.

Sigma Design Resumes

[Clipper]

Here's some snippets from resumes recently submitted to Sigma Design's HR department

Qualifications:

• Advanced knowledge of the C-c and C-v hotkeys in Windows

Work Experience

• NVidia

Re:Sue them

[Dark Paladin]

Us.

There should be a donation system to finance a lawsuit for the GPL - perhaps with the EFF or the Free Software Foundation being the collector.

We are the GPL. We are the ones who use it, live it breath it - and if we are truly a community that believes that the sharing of ideas is more powerful then the hording of them, then we must be the ones to pay for its support.

Comment from the FSF

[prizog]

We at the FSF are saddened by this GPL violation. Because we do not hold copyright on Xvid, we can't act directly. We support the Xvid developers' effort to get full GPL compliance from Sigma. If you're interested in how we enforce the GPL when we hold copyright, please see our attorney Eben Moglen's essay, Enforcing the GPL.

Re:GPL Powerless

[kuroth]

The best legal advice I ever recieved was from my father. It was, simply "I don't need a lawyer. I'm right." It's a philosophy that's been working for him for decades as a small business owner. It's worked equally well for me, also as a small business owner, for six years.

If someone plagarizes your work, sue them. The only information the judge is going to need is a copy of their source, and yours. Are they the same? Judgement for plaintiff.

Finding a couple of pro-bono expert witnesses in this case should be a snap, if that's even necessary. Hell, ask Stallman, he's always looking for a pulpit.

Over the years, I've had three or four clients who didn't want to pay for work I had performed. A couple of them even said "We're ready to be the 800 pound gorilla on this matter." (That's a direct quote from one, BTW).

Ok, you be an 800 pound gorilla. I have all my notes, all the specifications, all the correspondence related to the project ready to go. I have notes on every phone call, every meeting, every conversation. It costs me $40 to file, and all I have is time. If you want to tie up your $150 an hour lawyers for six months fighting an angry badger about a $20K project, go right ahead.

Funny, the check always shows up after that.

Don't let people push you around because you're a small operation, or because they think having more money guarantees them victory through intimidation.

K.

YES! I read it carefully - it's a smoking gun!!

[Totally_Lost]

I've been coding in asm since 1967 on two dozen different architectures. The asm routines that were disassembled are instruction sequence, register assignment and structure offset identical for dozens upon dozens of lines that are not simply C interface code. The probablility of two programmers choosing exactly the same data structures, exactly the same manual register assignments, and exactly the same instruction sequences is about the same as being struck by the planet venus in our lifetimes.

Sony and SN Systems copied GCC for PlayStation

[Myria]

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

Re:Sue them - I agree, for all copyright violation

[Sancho]

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

Finally the missing step!!!!

[JUSTONEMORELATTE]

1: Create cool open source stuff
2: Get ripped off by a for-profit outfit
3: Prove it, and sue
4: Profit!

Conference calls are for analysts. B-)

[Ungrounded Lightning]

No sense wasting your time; I can all but guarantee you the conversation will go something like this:

Q: "Does Sigma Designs have any comment on the recent accusation from the XVID team that their MPEG-4 codec infringes on XVID's copyright?"

A: "We're not aware of any court filings pertaining to the matter, so no, we have no comment."

Perhaps you will get that answer, but you may make other shareholders aware of it and start thinking about if they should still own stock.

That will get the company's attention better then anything.

It's better than that.

Conference calls are for analysts, i.e. reporters for the financial media and stock brokers. ANYONE can call in. (But you'll be asked for your affiliation. I recommend one of our big guns be the questioner - like somebody from FSF.)

Ask that question and the whole financial media community will hear it as:

XVID says you stole your core technology from them. They're about to sue. Since it's a GPL case they may have a well-endowed foundation and several large companies that are dependent on GPL for their business models to front the fees and several law professors to do pro-bono work for them as they litigate the enforcability of the GPL, with you funding the anti-GPL side. They'll also have the entire software community spreading the word that your technology is stolen, to your customers and distributors.

What effect will this have on your stock price?

There IS no good answer. So:

The brokers will call their customers and tell 'em to dump ahead of the rush.

The funds will just dump right away and try to beat the brokers to the market.

The analysts will write scathing articles about the stock for the financial papers and shows.

And their stock tanks. Even if the company survives the executives' stock options turn into wallpaper.

And that's BEFORE you get around to actually filing a suit. B-)

I'd go out and short 'em right now (or buy puts) - except that the software codec is not their core product. So they can clean up their act by releasing the source to the software codec under GPL before the conference call.

And the news (including links to XVID's smoking gun and the fact that slashdot has this item already) is already on the Yahoo SIGM stock discussion board. So it will already be factored into the price by the time I could trade. B-(