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."

Comments

Re:Did I Read the Right Article?

[mavenguy]

A better link is here.

Re:Did I Read the Right Article?

[Rashkae]

Wrong article is linked in the blurp. (But we already knew Slashdot 'editors' never actually verify this stuff) Try here

Here's to the first post to snipe at the editors and (hopefully) get modded way up :)

Re:H.264 = MPEG-4

[neutrino38]

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

• Two video codecs (MPEG 4 ASP and H.264) with several profiles
• Several audio codecs
• A file format
• A network transport
• etc ...

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

Re:Free ... of which patents?

[kyousum]

Doesn't this make H.264 only free of the two patents held by Qualcomm? There has to be dozens and dozens of other patents used as AFAIK H.264 is just a profile (AVC) of MPEG-4?

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.

Re:Free ... of which patents?

[novus ordo]

That's why organizations like this exist. Just because you use it in your home project doesn't mean you will get your pants sued by everybody imaginable. Not every organization is like RIAA or MPAA. However, if you intend to use it in a commercial product you should seriously weigh the advantages of licensing as opposed to litigating. Here are some of MPEG LA's licensing terms:

Royalties to be paid by end product manufacturers for an encoder, a decoder or both ("unit") begin at US $0.20 per unit after the first 100,000 units each year. There are no royalties on the first 100,000 units each year. Above 5 million units per year, the royalty is US $0.10 per unit.

# Title-by-Title - For AVC video (either on physical media or ordered and paid for on title-by-title basis, e.g., PPV, VOD, or digital download, where viewer determines titles to be viewed or number of viewable titles are otherwise limited), there are no royalties up to 12 minutes in length. For AVC video greater than 12 minutes in length, royalties are the lower of (a) 2% of the price paid to the licensee from licensee's first arms length sale or (b) $0.02 per title. Categories of licensees include (i) replicators of physical media, and (ii) service/content providers (e.g., cable, satellite, video DSL, internet and mobile) of VOD, PPV and electronic downloads to end users.

# Subscription - For AVC video provided on a subscription basis (not ordered title-by-title), no royalties are payable by a system (satellite, internet, local mobile or local cable franchise) consisting of 100,000 or fewer subscribers in a year. For systems with greater than 100,000 AVC video subscribers, the annual participation fee is $25,000 per year up to 250,000 subscribers, $50,000 per year for greater than 250,000 AVC video subscribers up to 500,000 subscribers, $75,000 per year for greater than 500,000 AVC video subscribers up to 1,000,000 subscribers, and $100,000 per year for greater than 1,000,000 AVC video subscribers.

Not really unreasonable. Especially when you consider what kind of license terms are offered for content(aka RIAA or MPAA).