Microsoft WMV In Patent Trouble?

thpr writes "According to rethink, Microsoft may be violating patents in their Windows Media software. Apparently, the VC1 standard (from The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers), which has been pushed by Microsoft, depends on patents owned by other companies - more than likely, those that have patents used in the previous MPEG standards. According to the sources in the story, both Sony and Philips may take the case to court, rather than continuing negotiation. As they point out in a later update, Sony might be pleased to have a say in the competing HD-DVD format. Is this a 'major speed bump to Microsoft's dominance of digital media markets'?" Well, the answer, IMHO, is probably not - this is a negotiation issue. But this is a wonderful example of how intertwined legal & software issues can become.

Comments

big deal?

[alphan]

Patent issues never stopped them before.

I'm not surprised

[Darren Winsper]

A friend of mine used to work at Dolby, and there were rumours there that a number of people thought Microsoft were infringing on several patents with WMV. This was a good couple of years ago, too.

Re:S/w or h/w patent

[YU Nicks NE Way]

In Europe, where software patents aren't yet valid, how does this apply?

Do you mean in all of Europe, or in those parts where the courts haven't decided yet? One of those things that FFII hasn't told you is that software patents are already valid in most of the largest countries in Europe, since Germany, Britain and France already have equivalents of State Street. The problem with software patents (from a corporate point of view) isn't whether they do or do not exist, but that they're inconsistent in a putatively free market. Pricing decisions can't be made fairly in a free market unless the regulations are evenly applied. Most of the corporations behind the proposed Europatent code don't particularly like software patents; instead, they want a method for estimating risk so that they can price that risk into their products.

Lots of errors in articles

[benwaggoner]

Whomever wrote the original article is pretty fuzzy on a lot of details.

Just to clear things up a bit:

VC-9 was based on Windows Media Video 9, which is the commercial release version of the WMV codec, plus the Advanced Profile extensions. It was later renamed VC-1. No difference between the two.

H.264 and VC-1 do have significant technical differences (I go worried when he described his research on this point as "Another source told us recently that they had had the codec explained to them, and confirmed that it did "pretty much" the same as H.264." Well, pretty much in the same way that MPEG-1 and RealVideo do pretty much the same thing. They're both codecs, but have significant differences with real-world differences. For example, VC-1 uses larger blocks than H.264, which helps with some content and hurts with others. H.264 supports multiple reference frames, which can improve compression, but slows encode and decode.

Lastly, these issues aren't that unusual - I doubt it would even be possible to build a competitive codec without stepping on a whole lot of patents. Microsoft has IP in H.264, after all. It's still not possible to build a patent free MPEG-2 decoder.

Re:Lots of errors in articles

[benwaggoner]

Nope.

The only video codecs for which patent license free decoding is available that I know of are H.263, MPEG-1, and VP3/Theora.