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Jury Rules That H.264 is Not Patented
Dr Kool, PhD writes "According to Bloomberg, a jury ruled against Qualcomm in their patent lawsuit against Broadcom. Qualcomm had sought $8.3 million in damages for patent infringement stemming from Broadcom's H.264 encoder/decoder chips. From the article: 'The patents, covering a way to compress high-definition video, are unenforceable in part because Qualcomm withheld information from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, jurors in San Diego said today after deliberating less than six hours.' This ruling clears the way for H.264 to become a widely adopted open standard."
A better link is here.
Here's to the first post to snipe at the editors and (hopefully) get modded way up :)
No. H.264 is only PART of MPEG 4
H.264 = MPEG 4 part 10 = MPEG 4 AVC
MPEG 4 is a how framework that comprises
The guys who wrote the standards (H.264) expected that one of the profile (baseline profile) would be patent free anyway
Anyway if this jugement could free up more profile, it would be great
True. There are 20 corporations participating in the MPEG LA patent portfolio for H.264. Each of these corporations believe they have patents essential to impliment H.264(here's a long list(pdf))) and are collecting licensing fees from hundred of licensees.
but why not?
"You're everywhere. You're omnivorous."
Article linked is yesterday's announcement that it's going to the Jury. Here's the link and text of the right article:
Broadcom sees win for 'H.264' industry
By Kathryn Balint and David Washburn
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITERS
January 27, 2007
After just six hours of deliberating, a federal jury found yesterday that chip maker Broadcom did not infringe on two patents held by San Diego-based Qualcomm and determined in two advisory votes that Qualcomm had withheld key information from a standards-making body and the patent office.
Union-Tribune file photo
San Diego-based Qualcomm lost a round in federal court yesterday against Southern California chip-making rival Broadcom.
Qualcomm, which accused Irvine-based Broadcom of infringing on two video-compression patents, was seeking $8.3 million in damages for one of the patents. It did not seek any damages for the other patent.
The San Diego jury's unanimous decision is a win for manufacturers that comply with the same video-compression standard as that used by Broadcom.
Qualcomm had argued that one of the two patents at issue was incorporated into the H.264 industry standard used in millions of consumer devices, such as high-definition DVD players and Apple video iPods.
"We're grateful for the jury's verdict - a resounding victory for Broadcom," said David Rosmann, vice president of intellectual property litigation for the company. "This is a victory not just for Broadcom, but for the entire H.264 industry."
Qualcomm had little to lose in the case but everything to win.
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If it had prevailed in its patent-infringement claims, it potentially could have asked courts to ban products that used the industry standard or sought royalty payments from their manufacturers.
Yesterday's decision does not affect Qualcomm's core business of licensing cell phone technology.
A loss for Broadcom, however, could have resulted in the ban of some of its chips and could have cost the company possibly hundreds of millions of dollars in future royalty payments.
The U.S. District Court case was just one of seven lawsuits between the two companies scheduled for trial this year.
"There certainly was a significant upside potential for us, but it was all upside, no downside," said Qualcomm executive vice president and general counsel Lou Lupin. "For Broadcom, it was all downside, no upside. It probably won't have any impact on us one way or the other. It's just the latest round in a series of battles."
The speed with which the nine-member jury returned the verdict was stunning, particularly for a case that involved more than 40 hours of testimony and evidence akin to a graduate-level college course on video compression.
Jury foreman David Ingraham, a Carmel Valley resident and retired vice president of finance and planning for McGraw-Hill, said the quick verdict came about because each jury member entered deliberations with a strong understanding of the evidence.
"I'm not going to say we were all electrical engineers, because we aren't," Ingraham said. "But people listened carefully to the testimony and took good notes - and it came down overwhelmingly on one side."
The jury did find that the two Qualcomm patents in question in the case were valid, a loss to Broadcom, which had argued otherwise.
One of the biggest blows to Qualcomm came in the form of advisory votes, sought by the judge, in which the jury questioned Qualcomm's integrity.
In one advisory vote, the jury found "clear and convincing evidence" that Qualcomm had withheld previous scientific studies on video-compression from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office when applying for one of the patents in question. The jury's advisory vote said that the patent is "unenforceable due to Qualcomm's inequitable conduct in the patent application process."
In the second advisory vote, the jury found that Q
It's perfectly fine to use Matroska, especially when you want to include SSA subtitles (very common in anime releases) or SRT subtitles (also common with anime due to being able to be muxed in an OGM container). Sure, GPAC (MP4Box et al.) can automatically convert SRT subtitles to Timed Text (ISO/IEC 14496-17), but that's not always desired (SSA subtitles can be styled in many different ways; TT cannot).
Also, you can't mux [Ogg] Vorbis in an MP4 container (I believe you can do that in a MOV/QuickTime container, however; also, using the private data stream hack doesn't count), and Vorbis can match, better, or come close to (dependent on source material) the quality of AAC at the same bitrates. Also, if H.264 (ISO/IEC 14496-10 for those who care) is truly now a public domain standard, then it would be far more desirable to mux H.264 video with Vorbis audio as both are open, unencumbered standards. It would also be good to do this in Matroska as that is also an open, unencumbered standard (QuickTime's file format may or may not be patented, but I'd guess it is).
Now I'd definitely recommend using MP4 if everything you're muxing is part of the MPEG-4 (ISO/IEC 14496) standard (e.g. H.264 (or even DivX/Xvid), AAC, TT) as that would make most sense, but beware the limitations of the MP4 container format. The "subtle differences" between MP4 and QuickTime/MOV are the codecs supported.
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