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:Free ... of which patents?

[CryoPenguin]

[quote]Doesn't this make H.264 only free of the two patents held by Qualcomm?[/quote]
Right.

[quote]There has to be dozens and dozens of other patents used as AFAIK H.264 is just a profile (AVC) of MPEG-4?[/quote]
Yes, there are lots of other patents involved in H.264, but that has nothing to do with the rest of MPEG-4. MPEG-4 is only a name; H.264 would be just as patent encumbered if it didn't share the name with 20 other standards.

Re:Slashdot editors: Only pretending to be editors

[tm2b]

I would have thought that, after all these years, Slashdot editors would have learned to be editors.

Hardly. After all these years, Slashdot "editors" have clearly learned well that they face no consquences for not learning to be editors.

And anyway, Isn't that supposed to be the glory of the "new" Web? If you assume that privileged editors have no valuable input to the process, well, they stop trying to make any valuable input into the process. Not that Slashdot "editors" have ever tried very hard...