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VLC & European Patents
CaptScarlet22 writes " VideoLAN is seriously threatened by software patents due to the
numerous patented techniques it implements and uses. Also threatened
are the many libraries and projects which
VLC is built upon, like
FFmpeg, and the other fellow Free And Open Source software
multimedia players, which include
MPlayer,
xine,
Freevo,
MythTV,
gstreamer."
In the interest of stimulating more discussion, some more information about this subject can be found here
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
You should only use MS media player. Then you wont run into these problems.
Don't get me wrong; I'd rather we just do away with patents entirely, but it's a fact that Europe will buy into this system sooner or later. Maybe now's the time to clean up any potentially infringing code or move it to an even more legally-backwards locale?
I never vote for anyone. I always vote against.
-- W.C. Fields
...or move it to an even more legally-backwards locale?
Actually, considering the nature of software patents, I should think we're looking for a place that is more legally forward-thinking...
On a sidenote, mplayer has the same message on its website. have a look: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/index.html
It should be legal to reverse engineer/use patented techniques when it is used to enable integration and compatibility in a non-commerical manner. Using patents to stiffle integration and compatibility should be considered a violation of fair use.
Patents which exist solely for the sake of preventing compatibility aren't "innovation."
One modern video codec is as good as any other. They're just all different implementations of the same basic mathematics. They all produce similar quality from similar file sizes. Businesses do the same stupid thing every time: patent one particular method (which is not necessarily better than any other method) of encoding, distribute EITHER the decoder to recipients or the encoder to content producers, whichever is easier for your business, and thereby bully the other group into paying for the use of your amazing "technology."
Gah. It's all bullshit.
During their implementation (which started years ago), they were aware that there were no software patents in Europe.
Given the number and scope of multimedia patents, the only way to clean up any potentially infringing code would involve rm -rf...
Let us get the names of those entities that are threatening with software patents. I will be very willing to join the effort to turn these companies the SCO route. My fear though, is that VideoLAN and other OSS companies will simply shift production to Asia where patents are not that well respected. This will mean that the US will be left behind. We are not doing that well in cell phone technology already. Asians and Europeans seem to be very advanced. We all know that the cell phone technology we are now getting as Americans is kin-of old if one compares it with what the Asians are doing now.
Programmers are generally recommended NOT to investigate patents at all. If they knowingly offend, they pay triple damages when taken to task over it in the US (holy mecca of patent litigation)
The generally accepted practice in the business world is build it without having any awareness that it was previously discovered or patented, then have your lawyers look for infringement and negotiate a deal. The developers, engineers, etc are generally prohibited from going anywhere near patents.
Consciously avoid being exposed to other ppls ideas, reinvent the wheel, employ a bunch of people who could be doing something productive to find out after the fact if anyone has invented this before, and then hope that there's enough revenue for your new idea left after you pay to license the patents.
Kind of puts the lie to the whole "in the interests of progress" thing, doesn't it?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
If this project disappears then it will be a huge step backwards for digital multimedia. On every system I use this is one of the first packages I install. One cannot trust quicktime or windows media players.
it is semi odd that Europe is anti media players in Windows, and then they are threatening to slay free media players. Seams like a double standard.
if i see a video stream, and decide to write a program that takes any chuncks of "000000000" and replace it with a "01", and so forth, and that is my way of compressing a file, but someone else programed that before me and filed a patent, does that mean i can't use that kind of code?
it is stupid to me to have patents on things that anyone can think up. what happens if a professor at a university thinks up something, but does not patent it. he teaches it to students, and they are free to use it. 2 years later a start up company in california has an employee who thinks up the same simple idea, and has it patented. what does that mean? that the original professor can no longer use it? that his students who might have used that idea in projects now have to remove it?
what is the purpose of patents. it seems to be very anti-competitive, and creates monopolies.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
1) Only play unpatented formats. 2) Make sure utilities are available to translate to those unpatented formats but don't own them. Just release them free out into the wilds of the internet where they will never entirely disappear despite efforts to squash them. 3) Encourage all encoders to only use open formats. --- Within the next 5-10 years, you will not be able to get content short of video taping it off a screen. They are going to have it completely locked down. It won't be because of technology per se but technology combined with severe legal penalties for circumventing that technology. They will send encoded audio and video streams that will be decoded as close as possible to the point where it becomes audeo and video. Picture a solid state combination speaker code and decoding device impossible to separate or patch into.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Why can't all these software packages just be hosted in outer mongolia (or somewhere where the patents don't apply that actually has hosting)?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
You just threaten that it breaks one of your patents, it ties up the developers into looking at the code and the patents. Development will be slower because of tied up resources, and you can attempt to kill it off. Even if the claim is bunk, you still make them lose much development time.
While it's probably not what DTS is after, they really don't compete with MPlayer, perhaps other companies will try it.
I'm just surprised DTS would even bother. After all, if your decoding capabilities are built-in to the most commonly used players, wouldn't that give prospective clients more incentive to use DTS? *shrug*
Vip
I have not RTFA, but I'm sure almost all of the codecs and the patents that are being discussed are owned by the MPEG group (being they are using MPEG-2 encoding/decoding without a license).
LAME is already illegal in the U.S. because it did MP3, and I suspect the rest of these projects will be killed off for similar reasons.
I'm not suprised - when you look for "free mpeg-2 decoders" you don't find much. Well, you don't find anything that is gratis. After careful research you find that open source projects are doing a lot of mpeg-2 work, but they usually don't advertise that fact.
I didn't say it was "right", but it's not suprising. Really, you can't do anything with SVCD or DVD on Windows without owning a MPEG-2 decoder. If I was someone who made money on selling MPEG-2 codecs, I'd go after VideoLAN too. It's a lucrative business.
Get your Unix fortune now!
I think you are thinking about trademarks, not patents. Hence why submarine patents are such a big problem.
--- Ãther SPOON!
Thanks! But isn't it an oxymoron that projects and software that are around for years will become illegal suddenly? I mean, presently, nobody has the ability to patent an algorithm in Europe. So, imagine someone in Europe that has thought of an original algorithm for, say, image compression. He is the first to think of it, but naturally he can't patent it. A year later, a company in America goes an patents the same technology. Now suddenly the EC decides to pass this stupid stupid stupid law. The original inventor would be in danger of getting sued for using something he originaly invented.
Brazil would probably be a good choice.
One stitch of GPL'd code and it is forbidden.
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html Section 7:... "... For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program."
Kopete has a warning message on its site as well.
In other words, unless your company is so big that you can use your huge patent portfolio against all equal-sized or smaller companies, you're hosed. This is a game that only multinationals can win - and that's why IBM and HP lobby for Software patenting in Europe despite their affiliation with Open Source. It's more important to them to be able to dominate the entire computer software industry than it is to work with us.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
So whilst writing a letter to my local MEP, I did a little research around the subject - and stubled upon this speech.
"Before concluding, I would like to say a few words on the substance of the proposal, since Parliament will now need to turn its attention to this. The Commission proposed to clarify the legal rules on patentability for software-related inventions. This does not include computer programs or other software as such. It means inventions that make a technical contribution and that are truly novel. Such inventions are present in a number of everyday consumer goods such as cars, mobile telephones and domestic appliances. The Commission's intention in making its proposal was to avoid the patenting of pure software and make a clear distinction between the European Union and the United States. Nothing that is not patentable now will be made patentable by the directive.
The current rules in the European Patent Convention leave patent examiners very wide decision-making powers. There can be different interpretations as to whether an invention can be patented. This leads to uncertainty for businesses. Small and medium-sized enterprises in particular are negatively affected by the lack of clarity in the existing rules.
I would like to remind Members that, in the absence of a directive, patents will continue to be granted. If patent offices decide to grant patents for pure software, then expensive procedures before the Courts will be the only option for those who wish to object.
Those of you who have been directly involved in working on this proposal know as well as I do that this is a very complex area. Any modifications will need to be carefully examined. The directive cannot be turned on its head. We need to maintain a proper balance between stimulating innovation and making sure competition is not stifled."
I'm a little confused...
The patent system is really, really, screwed!
In the long term there is NO WAY we can keep the EU or any other part of the world from approving patents on software, because politicians will always care about the interests of whom/what put and keep them in place, ie corporations not common people. The point is that we're slowly approaching the critical level where the concepts of doing "the right thing" and "the legal thing" take opposite directions and become mutually exclusive until we'll be forced to make THE choice.
The real question is not if, but when the moment arrives, are we ready to act as pirates? Because that's the point "they" are leading us to.
I recognize that there aren't a great deal of resources available to the average Free Software programmer, but surely after the deal with GIF a little more dilligence has been put into patent research?
Um... Why?
Some will take this as a troll, but I mean it in all seriousness when I ask "So what?"
The current patent minefield leaves NO room for independant implementations of any software concept any of us have ever heard of that that didn't originate either with-or-before Turing, or directly from the Open Source world. And even for those, it wouldn't surprise me to hear about some astoundingly trivial and ancient technique suddenly under patent, by companies that have adopted "extortion racket" as their business model (small enough fish can't afford to fight back).
Software like VLC and MPlayer know perfectly well that they violate a countless number of patents, and the authors just don't care (and if you really think they all live in Europe, I'd like you to show me "Connecticut" on a map of Europe). Any legit project that makes use of their source code needs their head checked, but projects like VLC don't care about infringement. And users thereof don't, either.
The corporate world, and the governments that pander to it, needs to realize that a growing number of people simply don't care about copyright or intellectual property in general (or to extend this a bit, about drug laws, speed limits, Terri Schivo, the outcome of our quadrennial tweedledum-vs-tweedledee popularity contest, and so on). The more they buy laws that result in serious congnitive dissonance when compared with physical reality, the less people take all laws seriously.
Software patents in Europe will have absolutely no effect on "our" world. The CEOs can all fret about the impending end to their current business models, the congresses/parliaments can all pass laws as fast as they like, but we will win. This particular "setback" just means that we'll start seeing a LOT more projects coming out of the Vanuatu's newest territory, Michigan. And in a decade, we might well have a large volume of software written on Saturn's newest moon, California, despite not even having a lunar colony by then.
Why ? Because GStreamer was designed *from the start* to be pluggable. The whole patent issue is one of the main reasons why GStreamer is designed the way it is. Sure, it took a lot longer to get to a point where stuff starts to Just Work, because we wanted to make sure we would be around when the shit hits the fan.
So while a lot of other projects chose to ignore the whole patent problem, and a lot of projects used the GPL as a license (which indeed is not compatible with patents), making it possible for any distro to ship them, we had the focus of making sure that the GStreamer platform is pluggable to the point where the libraries can be put in or taken out without breaking the applications. It's also one of the reasons why GStreamer, from the start, has been LGPL - because that allows distributors to ship a complete stack of GStreamer applications legally in places where software patents apply (like, say, the whole US). Fighting software patents is a great idea. Waving the problem away as if it's not there is not.
Also, with the arrival of Fluendo, a company building stuff on top of GStreamer, (and also a company I happily work for :)), people will be able to get codecs for the patented formats in a legal way, if they chose not to run the risk, or if they want to be legally safe.
What does this mean in the end ?
Very few distros have taken the risk to ship one of the other projects, for legal reasons. (Apparently the mighty Debian ships Xine, and while on any other non-free subject lots of noise is made, this one seems to be left alone because it's a big deal).
It is no coincidence that projects like mplayer, vlc, and xine do not get shipped by most distributions. In fact, coincidentally, Fluendo did a press release on this very issue yesterday.
So this is what the patent office does: For every category under which your invention falls, the patent office has a number of "experts" to whom it might refer. These experts can really be anybody who can demonstrate in-depth knowledge of a field, perhaps by meeting certain criteria set by the patent office, through tests of sorts. These experts would be paid by the patent office and given access to resources needed to analyze and research a patent application, in addition to the current patent researching procedures. The experts would then have the opportunity to swing the outcome of the patent application into one of several directions, such as "no", "yes", "need to be more specific", etc.
There wouldn't be just one expert assigned to a particular patent application. There would actually be a number of them, all of whom would cast some sort of vote to determine the outcome of a patent application. How many experts will have access to a patent application will depend on how many experts are signed up to review applications for the affected fields, how many applications are being reviewed, etc. When you file an application, you never know who or how many will review it. None of the experts will know who any of the other experts working on an application are.
Many safety precautions will be put into effect to make sure that the system works. If you think that all experts will vote "no" on all patent applications because it's something they might want to do themselves, the patent office will require an explanation of why the patent application is being rejected. This will be reviewed by the office's normal staff, who currently do all the work of reviewing patent applications. If you worry that companies will file zillions of patents for the same thing in an effort to make one of them get through the process, this can be fixed by keeping track of applications filed by particular organizations, with the office's normal crew rejecting duplicates that are too similar. If you are worried that experts will not put enough effort into reviewing applications, you can throw applications at them that have already been rejected as if these are new applications, to see if you get the same outcome. In fact, patents would, in this way, undergo a certain moderation, kind of like comments posted here on /., and there would be a sort of meta-moderation system in effect.
Hopefully, this would allow lots of people to spend, say, a few hours a week--PAID hours, mind you, paid for by the applicant--researching new patent applications in addition to current office research efforts. This will act as a filter to prevent a lot of crud from getting through.
This means several bad things will happen: Patent application fees will go up for the "lone inventor" working in his garage, while big corporations don't give a flying darn, but this can be fixed by implementing several changes:
Ok, so software patents suck big time. What do we do about it? Why not start a Free Patent Foundation (FPF). All patents owned by the FPF are freely licensed to anyone with the following restriction: Any party that makes use of a FPF patent library is required by the license to cross license their entire patent library with the FPF. Using a FPF patent constitutes acceptance of the license. Corporations would simply be blind sided because they are advised to NOT research patents or face triple damages. Now, when they violate our patents, ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US! ;-) Either that, or they have to stop shipping their product. If these companies really do patent 'defensively' as many say they do, then they shouldn't mind a bit now, should they? Once they are in the fold, all patents created by them are added to the FPF. Of course, I'm not a patent lawyer, so feel free to inform me that I'm a clueless moron...
...is just ignore patents, carry on regardless and make great software.
I know it all seems terribly seriously and gloomy, but when you have bad laws the only way they are killed or rendered impotent is if a large chunk of people reject it in everyday life and that's what people need to (carry on) doing. The FOSS community needs to harden it's resolve, stop flipflopping around and whining and just stay true to it's goals.
The 'law' has failed many many people throughout history and delivered incredible injustices and attrocities on humanity. It is not an absolute righteousness handed down by God or whatever creator you believe or don't belive in. It has certainely failed the FOSS movement, which needs to start looking beyond whatever the current law is now.
I suspect VLC and MPlayer are trying to drum up some sympathy and are shooting themselves in the foot a little bit with their "it will all end soon" messages (great software though they both are). And remember it was always pointed out to Slashdot by some here that Europe would not be the bastion of justice and morality some in the US thought it would be when it came to patents etc. Unfortunately the EU is riddled with corruption.
Just go forth and continue to make your software and distribute it by whatever means necessary. Because if you really believe in your heart you would let nothing or no one stop you.