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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."

2 of 365 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

  2. 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.