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Newest Patent Threat to MPEG-4

Posted by Zonk on from the there-has-to-be-something,-right? dept.

Sachin Garg writes "After the notorious JPEG patent which has made many big and small names pay huge amounts to Forgent (total more than $105 million), PCMag reports that AT&T claims to have a patent covering core MPEG-4 technology and has warned Apple and others of Patent Infringement. Pentax and Nero have already paid them."

6 of 365 comments (clear)

  1. Will Dirac be ready in time to rescue us? by TripMaster+Monkey · · Score: 3, Informative


    Some information on Dirac can be found here and here (PDF warning).

    --
    ____

    ~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey

  2. Re:How long have they been sitting on this? by yeremein · · Score: 3, Informative

    Perhaps I am confusing my types of Intellectual Property, but don't you have to show that you are actively defending your IP, or you give up your rights to it?

    You are. Trademarks must be defended, but patents don't have to be.

  3. You don't need your step 4 by Soybean47 · · Score: 4, Informative

    The point of a "..." or "????" step is that it's not clear how to get from the previous step to the following one. In this case, there's no "..." step. There's just proft.

  4. Re:Next gen codecs by WWWWolf · · Score: 3, Informative

    Or rather, Theora's time, which not only is actually implemented in multiple popular cross-platform player softwares (VLC, RealPlayer) and has a nice converter (ffmpeg2theora), it's also - hopefully - proven to be free of patent issues. =)

  5. SBC by chill · · Score: 3, Informative

    Please note that AT&T here really means SBC. SBC purchased AT&T not too long ago but kept the AT&T name. It is run by the same cocksucker who thinks Google, Yahoo and other content providers are getting a "free ride" on his infrastructure and wants to charge them for the right to travel his wires -- peering be damned.

      -Charles

    --
    Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
  6. Patent system disfunctionality is deliberate. by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 4, Informative

    Some people claim that the US patent system is broken, but that way of expressing the problem is a bit misleading. The word "broken" implies that something undefined caused the patent system to be disfunctional. That's not what happened. The disfunctionality was caused deliberately. Those who want government corruption so that they can make money have caused the patent system to be underfunded. They've done the same to the Internal Revenue Service and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Here are short reviews of books about the corruption: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government.