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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.
It's very tempting to declare the old addage, "Live by the sword, die by the sword", but I'm not sure if that's the right attitude. Following that to its logical conclusion, it seems the only people that will be able to make money in the future are attorneys. Try to do anything else and you'll be sued.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Like the poster, I don't think this is a major speedbump. ...but I also don't think that we're headed for a world where media formats are dominated by MS. They'll be a player in the industry for sure, but it's unlikely they'll have the same kind of dominance they've enjoyed in the operating system market.
I store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
Woderful is not the word I would use here. Nightmare. Catastrophe. SNAFU.
But not wonderful.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
You would think Microsoft would have learned not to use patented technology by now. It has a viral effect - build on existing patents and you are still caught in the trap.
...For an announcement in the next few weeks announcing Microsoft settling out of court for a massive, yet undisclosed sum of money, and getting exactly what they want. As usual.
Specialization is for insects. -Heinlein
Patent issues never stopped them before.
Well, now Microsoft have something to think about in reagrd it's pushing for EU software patent law....
In Europe, where software patents aren't yet valid, how does this apply?
Do only h/w versions of the codec infringe, or do s/w versions infringe as well?
Hmm...this technique is usually used by anyone in motion video or you will get screen flicker if you redraw the entire screen every frame.
Also, if these other companies are using WMV, wouldn't it be in their best interest to have their codec distributed with the huge marketshare of Windows users? I'm not sure if they were planning on selling a codec and what the market is to actually buy one. If I download something and it doesn't work with my standard codecs, I delete it.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
You have a very interesting point there.
Microsoft, with so much petty cash on its hands, will most likely settle out of court with the other litigants. And for those who are not willing to settle, Gates & Co will just simply buy them out in the typical Microsoft fashion.
not against sony.
i believe sony is bigger then MS. why would sony want to license stuff from MS when producing a movie to DVD or online (if we ever get online on demand movies).
so MS can't buy Sony out, and Sony can just lidigate the WMV format away for their own HD-DVD format.
If this doesn't go his way he'll either buy the company and "absorb it" or he'll just carry on and go "meh, I make more then that in a day".
Maybe we need a system where fines are set by how much money you earn per second. Average person earns $0 a second, so fines would be set to a lowest level (AKA all current levels, not RIAA current levels) and go from there.
I like muppets.
>If only terrorists use WMV then who uses Quicktime in this little universe anyway?
Oh that's easy... gay terrorists.
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.
Imagine there's no patents,
It's easy if you try,
No lawyers around us,
Above us only sky,
Imagine all the people
developing in joy...
Imagine there's no lawsuits,
It isn't hard to do,
Nothing to fight or pay for,
No worries too,
Imagine all the people
hacking code in peace...
Imagine no copyrights,
I wonder if you can,
Nothing to support greed or hunger,
A brotherhood of geeks,
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...
You may say I'm a dreamer,
but I'm not the only one,
I hope some day you'll join us,
And the world will live as one.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
A few million in a case like this is chump change.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
With general closed source software like Windows, and many others, we just don't know what is being stolen, recompiled, and hidden away.
For all we know, many closed source software companies could be hiding much stolen and modified stolen code, and what's worse is that they can easily get away with it.
Legal and software issues intertwined? That's putting it mildly. It's more a cat's cradle or some bizarre Gordinian knot.
The legal issues, the patent insanity, are just making it harder and harder to make progress. At what point is it just not worth DOING something becasue of all the legal hassles involved.
Today it's media formats. What more could go wrong and what could grind to a halt?
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
The article actually suggest that if it went to court, the final figure would be more like $5 BILLION. Not such pocket change, even for MSFT
But who in their right mind would use a video format that 'phones home' every time you watch 'Anal Love Dog HD: Director's cut'?
WMV-HD kind of sucks anyway: there are some horrid compression artifacts in the roller-coaster shots in one of the sample WMV-HD files.
s/software/*
legal issues intertwine all facets of our lives. software is no exception and it hardly could be considered to be intertwined more than anything else.
The only thing this is an example of is the legal nature between corporations. Software is just the details that don't really matter much. The could be talking about the production of blorps and gizmo gadgets for all they care. As long as it makes them money and as long as the legal system is used to the fullest extent possible to garuntee them the biggest cut. They don't really think of it as applying law to software as they really don't care if its software or a physical product. Makes no difference to them or the legal system.
This isn't so much an example of the evils of closed source software - which, IMHO, we lived with very comfortably for many years. This smacks more of the law of unintended consequences, and highlights the amazing complexity and the chaotic progression of software patents.
There will come a time, if the tide is not stemmed, when it will not be possible to write software, closed-source or otherwise, without infringing on someone's patent. We're only a few years into most of the patents' 17 (20?) year lifespan; the skies do look forbidding indeed.
In the corporate world everyone seems to have one (at least). Thats the problem with this kinda of generic ip. In hard science you can patent things like a machining process for maufacturing xyz, or a chemical compound, or chemical process.....
In the software world it's not that cut and dried. Hopefully someone will figure out that saying I'm patenting 'a video format that can be played on digital devices' is not going to cut it, and does not give the patent holder the rights to all video formats ever created.
Or not and europe and china will leave us and our lawyers in the dust.
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
Well, since they've got something around 98% of the market share, I'd say their 'sneaky little tricks' are paying off.
Sometimes it works but on the other hand sometimes it dont and then they get sued.
Exactly. and when it doesn't work, they simply settle for what seems to us mere mortals to be exorbitant sums of money, but to them is merely pocket change. I'm not sure you realize just how deep M$'s pockets really are.
Well just wish they could crash and burn once and for all.
No, you don't. You don't want to be under something that big if it's about to 'crash and burn'...and face it...we're all under it.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Microsoft will continue to use the patents to gain market penetration and after a 4-year court battle make a settlement for what will amount to 4 days worth of profits.
Microsoft is unstoppable.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
And who do you think will foot the bill over the next 2 to 3 years?
If you don't know how to answer this correctly, riddle me this: How did Microsoft make most of its money? If there's a price to pay, we're going to pay it. Directly or indirectly, we'll (those who use Microsoft products, which is the majority of computer users, like it or not) have to pay it.
This reminds me of professional sports. Teams don't pay players. We do. Same goes for advertising, etc. We always pay.
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I can see Clippy on the stand right now...
[Lawyer] So Clippy, how is it you can animate yourself into interesting and rude shapes?
[Clippy] I see you are trying to cross-examine me. Would you like me to show you how?
Attorneys can only sue you if you've broken a law. If you don't like the laws then vote for different lawmakers.
$8.95/mo web hosting
You're getting slapped with a suit for copyright infringement. Did you think you could just use that song however you wanted? What kind of world do you imagine we're in?
There are 2 kinds of people in this world. Those that can keep their train of thought,
Sony made a particular point about this shortly after the DOJ scuttlement, when MS told them that the Court required uniform license terms and that meant no more exemptions from the non-assert clause.
At this point, the issue is likely to be boiling down to what (if anything) MS is willing to pay to keep Sony and Philips (and any others) from suing MS' users. Since neither company wants the bad PR from anything like that, they'll settle for peanuts.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
That is, by the way, the back door that got the US into the software patent business: lawyers just drew up claims for Rube Goldberg hardware that did the same thing without reference to software, then claimed the software by the Doctrine of Equivalences.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
This is Sony trying to stick it to Microsoft, who is their PS3 competitor. Sony is still pissed that Microsoft decided to enter the console market and push their DirectNext platform after they first offered it to Sony for the PS2, and Sony turned them down. Microsoft sells the X-Box at a loss because they're trying to push that software platform. They even offered it to Nintendo, who also turned them down. So, they decided to make their own console.
This is also why you saw Sony's head guy at MacWorld '05. Sony wants to get rid of Microsoft and will help out with doing that so far as it benefits them.
Sounds like Microsoft may inadvertantly be in the market to purchase Sony and/or Philips.
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.
My video compression blog
If law was software, it'd be the most inefficient, resource-wasting, bug-ridden piece of code ever.
Sounds like a DRM opportunity to me:
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
Fining companies punishes the company, in terms of its shareholders who are its owners. If they are fined enough they go bankrupt. It's nonsense to claim fining them is pointless.
I am trolling
Acctualy, you both are right in you own ways. Fining the company is, in essense, the same as making the product(s) more costly to produce. This increas in cost will bring about both higher prices and lower profits and the price elasticity will descide in what proportions. The fact that microsoft can be viewed as a monopoly will have an impact but not enough to negat it.
Karma: 2.71828182846 (Mostly due to small, fun pills)
VC-1, like MPEG-2, is standardized as how to parse and decode the data stream. The encoding is not actually standardized or defined. Infact, compression gets better every year, even for old-school codecs like MPEG-2, because of new encoding technology.
;)
I suspect that there may be fewer patent problems with the standardization of VC-1 than there are with the implementation of VC-1 (or any kind of WMV). Things like efficient algorithms for determining motion estimation vectors is where you would find the serious patents, these are encoding issues.
(BTW, I am at the SMPTE meeting in Pasadena right now, but I probably won't be attending much of S22. Nor would I talk about it if I did