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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.
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.
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.
>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!
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
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.
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.
Now accepting PayPal donations!
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,
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.
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
Sounds like a DRM opportunity to me:
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