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Steve Jobs Hints At Theora Lawsuit
netcrawler writes "Steve Jobs' open letter on Flash has prompted someone at the Free Software Foundation Europe to ask him about his support of proprietary format H.264 over Theora. Jobs' pithy answer (email with headers) suggests Theora might infringe on existing patents and that 'a patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other "open source" codecs now.' Does he know something we don't?"
Update: 05/01 00:38 GMT by T : Monty Montgomery of Xiph (the group behind Theora, as well as Ogg Vorbis, and more) provides a pointed, skeptical response to the implicit legal threat, below.
Monty writes: "Thomson Multimedia made their first veiled patent threats against
Vorbis almost ten years ago. MPEG-LA has been rumbling for the
past few years. Maybe this time it will actually come to
something, but it hasn't yet. I'll get worried when the lawyers advise
me to; i.e., not yet.
The MPEG-LA has insinuated for some time that it is impossible to build any video codec without infringing on at least some of their patents. That is, they assert they have a monopoly on all digital video compression technology, period, and it is illegal to even attempt to compete with them. Of course, they've been careful not to say quite exactly that.
If Jobs's email is genuine, this is a powerful public gaffe ('All video codecs are covered by patents.') He'd be confirming MPEG's assertion in plain language anyone can understand. It would only strengthen the pushback against software patents and add to Apple's increasing PR mess. Macbooks and iPads may be pretty sweet, but creative individuals don't really like to give their business to jackbooted thugs."
The MPEG-LA has insinuated for some time that it is impossible to build any video codec without infringing on at least some of their patents. That is, they assert they have a monopoly on all digital video compression technology, period, and it is illegal to even attempt to compete with them. Of course, they've been careful not to say quite exactly that.
If Jobs's email is genuine, this is a powerful public gaffe ('All video codecs are covered by patents.') He'd be confirming MPEG's assertion in plain language anyone can understand. It would only strengthen the pushback against software patents and add to Apple's increasing PR mess. Macbooks and iPads may be pretty sweet, but creative individuals don't really like to give their business to jackbooted thugs."
He doesn't know anything that we don't already know.
However, he, on the other hand, thinks different. (TM).
Luckily, there are no software patents :-)
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Time for the Two Minute Hate!
Can we do this maybe just once a day?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Apple's new slogan: "There's a patent for that."
zosxavius photography
The apple is the best computer. I don't care who he sues, it is for a good reason no doubt. Stop stealing from apple you dirty hippies.
Microsoft conspicuously said today that IE9 will only support H.264 for HTML5 video. Add in Apple and you have the two largest consumer OS vendors backing the same codec. I suspect they do know something the public doesn't, even if they themselves will not be a party to this patent challenge.
Theora will just end up becoming collateral damage in the coming war all of the large vendors are about to wage with Google. Follow the breadcrumbs and that's where you eventually end up.
And here comes Apple apologists. You know what, fuck you, fuck steve jobs and fuck my karma.
They need to move fast, clean VP8 up and push it into Chrome, Android and youtube. Firefox and Opera will follow quickly and the attempt to lock web multimedia into propietary formats from Apple and Microsoft will fail.
This move from Apple and the Microsoft's statement about only supporting H.264 are a reaction to Google's purchase of VP8. Both Apple and Microsoft are terrified of Google. They are willing to give up quicktime and wmv as long as Google doesn't succeed in pushing an open source, patent free solution to web video.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
Unlike other community things, it actually works and people will defend it, because they are using what they write themselves. Go after Open Source and you are basically dead, even when it may take you a long time dying. The time to play games of greed and power with software are over. This stuff is critical infrastructure, everybody needs it and it has to be both good quality and readily available. Open Source can do that. No other approach can. And this becomes harder and harder to ignore.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
If there was only a Richard Stallman for every Steve Jobs and Steve Ballmer.... On second thought, a global epidemic of athletes foot may not be the best scenario either.
Just like Microsoft hasn't sued anybody over the supposed patent violations in Linux.
Possibly for similar reasons. FUD is cheaper and easier to generate than a lawsuit that won't get thrown out of court, and maybe even get you sanctioned.
Don't worry Korey, you'd be hilarious even if an Apple Fanboy didn't donate his liver to Steve Jobs.
Looks to me, Steve Jobs just knows there are people looking into suing Theora. Not Steve Jobs (or Apple) is going to sue Theora.
Even if that's the case he made the announcement in the form of a FUD attack on Theora and the other open source CODECs.
Now lots of potential adopters will instead be waiting for the other shoe to drop before considering an open source solution - and paying for proprietary stuff meanwhile. And if the shoe never drops they'll wait, and pay, a very long time. This is the magic of FUD.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Jobs is partly correct and part incorrect.
When he says "All video codecs are covered by patents" he is incorrect. Patents are limited by their claims and it is completely possible that there is a codec that does not fall under any patents. One such codec, the null codec that simply turns every input bit into itself, is probably free of any patents. Of course that would be a silly codec.
Just because something is open source does not mean that it does not infringe on one or more patents. A lot of folks confuse "copyright", which protects expression, with patent, which protects ideas. Under patent even an independent expression (an implementation), even an open source one, might impinge on a patented idea.
I suspect that pretty much everybody here, including myself, is of the belief that patents have been granted that are overbroad, that live too long, and that are simply reflective of prior or obvious practice that existed at or prior to the time of the patent filing. There is much that is broken in the patent system.
I can readily believe that ogg/theora might impinge on some patent in some country. Then again it might not. And whether that patent is itself valid is a question that would have to be answered once we knew what those putative patents were.
Since proving that something like ogg/theora doesn't infringe is like proving a negative, it is pretty hard to ever say that something is provably and undeniably free of patents.
But it would, in my opinion, be a good thing to have the matter fully debated in the context of a lawsuit. It would create a forum where the H.264 people (and other patent-codec people) could duke it out with the open source codec community in a place where we could get some definitive answers that ratchet and lock into place and thus give guidance to us in the future.
If Ogg/theora (or Google's VP8) violates a patent it is better to know it now so that we can work around the patent or obtain blanket community licenses.
My own guess is that if the Apple or the MPEG people engage in something more than sabre rattling that they will find the open source community a resourceful and dedicated opponent. Most particularly, the open source community is probably a very formidable opponent on the question of whether that patent on which the claim of infringement is based is itself valid.
Apple and the MPEG people could find that at the end of the battle that their own patents have fallen.
You raise a valid point, except for as alluded to in my post, Steve Jobs/Apple does not own the patents in question. Your analogy would be correct if Apple owned the patents.
I'm ready to go "all-in" with a bet that says the second Google releases the source to VP8, every company with patents on video compression will begin examining VP8 source code for patents. They have their legal teams and engineers ramped up to start digging ASAP and I do believe that's what Steve Jobs means.
I don't think it's Apple who's assembling this set of patents. The lawsuit WILL happen sooner or later, inevitably. If Apple started distributing Theora, this lawsuit would happen within a month, even though they're in MPEG LA. Who knows what their contract with MPEG LA says, too. They might lose the right to distribute h264 as a consequence.
I understand SJ on this one, even if I think his "thoughts on flash" are utter and complete bullshit for the most part.
Bubbe, I probably know a lot you don't.
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
This makes no sense to me. Lets run with your thought experiment for a moment. Google release a blinding implementation of VP8 support in Chrome next week, then FF and Opera pick it up and release browser updates the week after. Somehow, content providers decide this is a great idea and they all jump on the VP8 band wagon. How does this hurt Apple? What's to stop Apple from adding it to OS X and the iPhone OS along side H.264 and supporting both. How does this give google some kind of competitive edge over Apple that would make Apple "terrified"? They both have full access to H.264 and related tools today, so nothing would change with adoption of VP8: the status quo is maintained. You're just trying to blind people with FUD.
Steve jobs has NEVER been a nice fellow. :)
This isn't about Xiph ... this is about Google.
Apple is in a very similar position as Microsoft was a while ago, and they are using the EXACT same playbook ... FUD.
Steve Jobs walks into a coffee shop and finds a college-aged student drinking chai, busily typing away on a laptop in front of him on the table.
"Hey, kid, what's up?" Steve Jobs flashes a big smile, and extends his warm, friendly paw.
The college kid looks up while sipping on his drink, and for a moment does not register his messiah, until he does a double take and spills chai down his shirt.
"Wow! It's really Steve Jobs! I hope you heard my prayer last night!"
"Um, yeah..." Jobs says, affirming the question with a hint of confusion. "Look, I'll give you an iPod, signed with my name on it, if you give me your liver."
College student's eyes widen. He can barely contain his excitement, and he manages to mutter a weak "yes" before passing out from his sheer spiritual bliss.
The next day, Steve Jobs woke up for the first time in a long time, ages in fact, free from jaundice and a new hankering for a few shots of Malibu, and was last seen leaving a box that said "i-p-p-p-p-p-pod" on a grave in a cemetery.
The porn industry chooses its standards. Everyone else follows.
It's interesting how often this myth gets repeated. If anything, the porn industry went with HD DVD in the high definition disc format wars. And we all know how well that worked out:
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/01/8602.ars
I know it sucks by modern standards, but the claim that "all video codecs are covered by patents" is a bold one to make - surely MPEG 1 is either at or close to the end of its patent life (at least in the US)?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-1
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Did someone destroy Basil Hallward's painting of him?
I'm about 99% sure that Apple does, indeed, own H.264 patents.
The various *LAs are licensing consortiums. They don't own the patents they license, they're authorized to license them (and then only in limited ways) by the patent holders.
Steve Jobs would indeed know if there was a group assembling a patent pool to "go after" Theora. And from what I've read of Xiph's attitudes to patents, I suspect they have a case. It'll be interesting to see.
(Maybe this'll help Dirac, which in many ways is a more promising codec, and has the advantage that the BBC did quite a bit of work on making it "Free")
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Well that might have been the case with betamax over video2000, but Sony chose blue-ray... When they brought out the PS3. And that's why blue-ray is the format these days. And no, there was no porn on it... Then again, I only know people with a ps3 that actually use blue-ray. Dvd is fine. Back in the old days, there was no internet where you could get your porn. Big difference there.
Open source codecs hurt the Apple MPEG LA connection. ;)
Everybody loves the manual prices, codec prices, lock in cash flow feel and Theora "like" lock out.
Apple, Real, MS ect all seem to want a codec to lock in developers and milk them at some workflow level eg. color correction, production software ect.
The idea that some free blog could set you up with a "good enough" Linux/Mac/Win guide to shoot 720/1080 HD media, edit, encode it and give/broadcast/sell to the world is just wrong to Apple, MS ect.
You should be buying Apple or MS low end software, learning via student discounts and then walking in and buying $1000 to 10000+ worth of software to start and then think about itunes ect to sell your art.
Theora is the main threat to this. People have the creativity, low end HD cams, friends, a codec and the web.
Nothing is stopping them from bypassing Apple, Hollywood, MS ect. and going to the consumer except a good free codec for real world web "sharing".
You still need a CC system for payments
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I've often made the argument that Apple is far more evil than Microsoft in terms of pursuing vendor lock-in and coercively leveraging one product in order to drive sales of others to the detriment of real competition; the only thing that held Apple back was that it blew the marketing battle against Wintel a long time ago. Now that their fortunes are on the rise again, we can reasonably expect to see Apple flex its muscles in ways that are just as insidious as Microsoft during its rise to dominance. This being one of those occasions, I'll say it again: Apple was innocuous for so long because they simply didn't have the market share to abuse their customers (much).
Now, for the other half of this endless loop, I'll yield the floor and let the usual crowd of Mac fanboys explain to us how Apple's predatory stance towards Open Source is really insanely great. (And really, this should be a great occasion for nostalgia, since the release of the iPad gives Apple fans the first chance they've had in several years to argue that preemptive multitasking -- or, in this case, any multitasking -- is actually a good thing.)
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Nope. Porn went for VHS: it was more prosaic economics that did it for Betamax. Porn hasn't created the One Streaming Format yet, either. The porn industry went for HD-DVD over Bluray, an expensive mistake. The one thing they've done right is accepting and working with piracy to increase the size of the market.
[FUCK BETA]
They need to move fast, clean VP8 up and push it into Chrome, Android and youtube
And then Android battery life starts horribly suffering due to lack of hardware support. Sounds like a winning idea!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Here's the perspective of Greg Maxwell from Xiph on Steve Jobs' claims:
http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/theora/2010-April/003769.html
It's from a 419 scam bait prank. P-P-P-Powerbook
At the very beginning of Apple he was the Eddie Haskell. Woz was the nice fellow.
Every since they were the "Jobs" Apple. Initially, Apple was the "Woz" Apple. Products centered around what he, as a geek, liked. Jobs just marketed them (and marketed them well I might add). However that lasted only until around the mid 80s. Then the "Jobs" Apple took over.
Well that Apple has always been about control, about lock in. They want to tell you what you are going to do on your computer. When you want more power, they want you to throw it away and buy a new one. They will tell you what technologies to use and when the decide one is obsolete (like ADB) they'll just drop it and leave you to struggle or purchase new equipment. It is their way or no way.
I don't see any change in Apple behavior now that they are popular again, they've nearly always acted this way. It is just more people are noticing, and people who aren't so accustomed to it. The hard core Mac heads are used to what Apple does, since that's how they've always done it. They either accept it, or rationalize it. The thing is, now we have people buying Apple gadgets because they are shiny and trendy. However they are not so used to this "We are going to tell you what it is," idea.
Personally, I say if you don't like it, don't shop Apple. You don't lack for choices in the tech market. If you disagree with their strategies, go elsewhere. I do not at all care for the way they do things, so I own no Apple products. This is no great loss to me, I'm not excluding myself from anything I want. I love my computer, I love my Blackberry, I've got the devices I want that do what I want. I can live with the fact that they aren't trendy.
Don't settle for being 99% sure - go and check:
http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx
Apple owns one patent licensed through the h264 pool, "Using order value for processing a video picture", US 7,292,636.
As noted in the summary, the patent holders seem keen to insinuate that you simply can't do video codecs without infringing on their patents, without actually saying so plainly.
As noted in the summary, Jobs says 'a patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other "open source" codecs now' - and I read "go after" as "attack", because that's what it is.
Perhaps if we didn't allow asshats to decide they can control the use of mathematics, to decide they can use patents as weapons, we wouldn't have this sort of crap to worry about.
I've always been a PC at heart.
Not like the rest, the others. Everyone around me. I was at odds with my society and knew it early since birth. Unlike them, I did not "Think Different!"--the mantra of the Macs around me, the phrase on all the billboards in the city that served as a reminder to its citizenry. Sameness pervaded the essence of my being and no amount of self-conditioning I did could change that. Eventually, I gave up and isolated myself emotionally from society.
I gaze at the faces going by, the white earphones contrasting their black turtlenecks, connecting their ears to their pockets, their blank faces engrossed in hip Indie rock music and various garage bands. I envied them for their perfection against my flaws and my compulsive nature to expand, to burden my life with troubles instead of remaining, like them, simple and easy to deal with. The grandest of virtues, simplicity... the philosophy by our loyal benefactor Steve Jobs, who descended from the heavens, creating the Earth, the iron, the wind and the rain. Steve Jobs, who defined the parameters of existence, the one who set about the patterns of reality, the constants, the variables. He who made gravity, electromagnetic energy, and shaped atomic structures and brought forth motion. From these things, he crafted the elements, processed them, refined them, and from these things engineered Apple products through the purity of his mind. Each Apple product was individually crafted by his own hands with the programming code used to run each device having being compiled in his brain and uploaded to each device telepathically, breathing life and perfection into each and every unit.
Except, it seems, for me, for I was not among the many. I was a PC. They were Macs. I've always been a cold, stiff person. I got by, disguising myself by keeping my non-Ipod music player safely out of sight, which I use because of my depraved nature demanding more functionality than the simple and easy-to-use Ipods have to offer.. In the safety of my own home, behind locked doors, I ran a Forbidden, a contraband computer from more depraved, earlier days that was not given the love and blessing of being birthed by Steve Jobs. I dual booted, out of the great sin of curiosity-- curiosity, a shameful value of a PC, as curiosity has no place where simplicity matters most--using two of the great unutterable blasphemies-- something called "Windows Vista" and something else called "Linux." Although, as I mentioned before, although my tendency to be a PC and towards conformity has always been inherent to me, I was truly transformed when I found these old things in a hidden cache of computer parts predating The Purging. Perhaps the greatest sin of all, the single evil that, if discovered, would damn me forever, was the fact that my mouse had more than one button.
As I walk among the Macs on the streets, passing the Starbuckses as I went along, I wondered how it all came to this. I glanced at The Holy Marks on the foreheads as the people wandered down the streets, the Bitten Apple tattooed on all our of us at birth, and wondered if, perhaps, there could be something more to life. But again, this was a PC's thought, and not, like everyone elses', a Mac's. We were to hold ourselves to the philosophy of Steve Jobs--so as his products were designed for idiots, so too were we to be idiots. But I was not a Mac--I was not an idiot. I was simply too complicated to be a worthwhile person.
Nature called. I found a nearby public iPoo--squeaky clean and sparkly white, things weren't all bad--and let myself go, expelling the waste that had accumulated inside me. After relieving myself and committing the overly-complicated and thus illegal act of wiping my ass (I did not flush as iPoos, designed to be idiot-proof, did not flush) I left and once again wandered the streets aimlessly, hoping to find some meaning in a world where I simply did not belong, a world where if my true nature was discovered, I would be endlessly persecuted by smug, self-righteous sons of bitches.
From your references, the AVC/H.264 Patent List is a 49 page pdf file. Each page shows about 10 to 20 patent numbers, or around 700 by a quick calculation.
Interestingly, Apple has only one patent.
Dude you forgot to include the joke as well.
I disagree. I thought it captured the essence of both Jobs and his followers rather well. Now, if you happen to be one of those followers, you probably found the post much less entertaining.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
This isn't about Xiph ... this is about Google.
Apple is in a very similar position as Microsoft was a while ago, and they are using the EXACT same playbook ... FUD.
Attacking Theora is an attack on Google how exactly?
Oh wow they have some open source stuff, just like Microsoft, they're totally absolved of all those entirely unrelated things I talked about in my post, oh how wrong I was about them, they're total saints because the core of their OSes and some other doodads are open source.
If robots running OSS destroy humanity I will rejoice, for our death would be righteous.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
All video codecs are covered by patents. A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other “open source” codecs now
(emphasis mine)
Google recently acquired On2 and plans to Open Source the VP8 codec.
"..."
We don't know for sure, but H.264 is in such wide use that any patent holder would either have asserted its patents or risk having its claims estopped by laches. (Laches is legalese for "you snooze, you lose.") Theora doesn't have this advantage.
I hate to burst your bubble ..
- Apple has no significant H. 264 license and has no grounds to sue anyone related to Theora. Apple is saying they know litigation is pending by a 3rd party.
- Apple permits writers and publishers the ability to set their own eBook prices. The market defines the prices.
- The Apple engineer who lost the iPhone remains employed by Apple.
- Flash sucks right, we all agree to that, we all think it should die? Apple starts 'battling it' and it's evil?
Would work if the patent office was competent. They're not; they're happy to accept multiple patents on the same thing (there were at least two LZW patents, and run length encoding has been patented many times).
When a prior art claim is evaluated, the standards are ridiculously stringent. Any small difference between the prior art and the patent means the patent stands. On the other hand, when a device is evaluated for infringement, the standards are quite broad; little differences don't count.
The only advice the attorney would give is "don't". There's no point in consulting a lawyer unless you _want_ to kill the deal.
You're legally prohibited from implementing H.264 except with permission of the people who own it. That's about as proprietary as something can possibly get.
If there was a codec with no documentation whatsoever, just binary-only implementations - that could still be more open than H.264, because the only obstacle to implementing it would be one's ability to reverse engineer the binaries, rather than one's ability to fight off the police.
I agree 100%. Those days are coming fast, thanks to the reduced energy requirements of adding more cores compared to more complex cores. Video is one of those things that is comparatively easily parallelized. And bandwidth is getting better and better, cheaper and cheaper. 1 ghz to the curb is a reasonable goal for 2020. And considering that the average home probably has over a terabyte of storage right now, a petabyte by 2020 is probably a very conservative estimate.
I usually never post on here, though from time to time I do browse the site. However, some of the commenters seem to be mistakened. All video codecs are not protected by patents, as far I a know. All video codecs worth using, however, are patented. At this time we do NOT know if Theora does indeed include patented technology. The legal department here is currently looking into it. I also stand by my word and for as long as control of the company remains in capable hands, there shall be no Flash support on our mobile devices.
Sent from my Mac Pro.
Thanks.
Jobs is worse than Bill Gates.... granted, both are pretty much assholes, but Jobs, I feel, is even worse. He's just lucky to be the underdog so he can look like he's fighting the bad guy.
I don't even think (correct me if I'm wrong) that even Bill Gates stole from his #2.... Wozniak was the mind behind the Apple II and yet Steve Jobs cheats Wozniak out of money because he, Woz, was in the hospital at the time (if I have the story straight). What a great man to run a company. Hell, maybe he can be an "innovative" CEO by asking potential employees if they're virgins or not! Think Different!
Apple's R&D, marketing, and innovation is far better than Microsofts, and that's undoubtedly true. But the way they act, their soviet style secrecy, suing fans of theirs who leak material simply because they love Apple's hardware and software, disgusts me. They're worse than Microsoft and as bad as MS is, I'm almost glad they were the monopoly we got in the 80s and 90s and not Apple Computers.
Plus Apple gets it a bit easier, with them taking the backbone of their O/S from FreeBSD.
I think the line "don't go all Howard Hughes on us" qualifies for the meme of the year.
Microsoft was the "modern, young, alternative" to IBM. Then Apple, then Next, Google, and so many others. It's pointless - companies are run for profit, and letting opportunities for profit pass is not what they do. Morality or legality of actions is an issue, but the profit is quite the issue. The alternative would be for us to give our money to open source programmers, but we keep shooting our feet and not doing that.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
I can't believe what I'm reading here today. The video codec "war" is over; Google doesn't really even have a horse in the race. Apple devices support H.264 and Microsoft is putting it into the next IE version. Between Apple and Microsoft that covers an overwhelming majority of the video players and that's what any sensible web site will be using to encode their video files.
VP8 may be very cool and Theora is nice, too. But see the above and realize that even if all of the "me too" web browsers use open source codecs exclusively they'll insure that they'll remain a "me too" browser. I'm sure that the Firefox users here (like me) have noticed the (still) large number of web sites that are reduced in function or unusable to that browser. If those sites can't even be troubled to write HTML that works on all browsers, what makes anyone think they'll maintain multiple copies (encoded in multiple formats) of each video file so that when some uncommon / open source web browser comes along it'll be able to view the videos? Even mighty Google isn't in a position where they can force a video codec on us.
If open source zealots want to engage in battles like this, they need to pick their battles better. And those intellectually dishonest postings trying to blame Apple for the way things are don't serve anyone. Put some of that time and effort into making a difference instead, OK?
Here's something to think about: is it possible to write a codec that plays H.264 files without infringing any patents? Don't assume it's impossible - it could very well be possible and that could lead to an open source codec that is compatible with what the big boys use. That's a worthy goal; who's going to give it a try?
Stop feeding this troll already. By buying Apple products you essentially finance a war against your freedom.
Xserves are hardware, Sun Messaging Server is a piece of software written in C.
As a Theora developer, this is news to me. Would you mind mentioning who this buddy is so I can go back through my mail queue and verify that you're just making shit up?
I know you're lying, as regardless of what our response would have been it most certainly would _not_ have been, "ssshhh don't tell anyone".
Dup post! You've already posted this a mere 428 days ago!
We can put linux in a watch - but for most, a laptop is "good enough."
Same thing with TVs - the 27" color TV was the staple for a whole generation - and it went from almost the price of a new car to $200 during that time (and there are still all those people who haven't moved on to hi-def tv).
Yes, doubling the screen size was nice, but I'm not trading in my 50" for a 100" any time soon - where would I put it? That's becoming a problem. Same as you can only cram so many screens (or a screen of a certain size) on your desk. Do you really want to have to stand while working on your computer, like those faked interactive screens on the TV crime shows?
The MPEG-LA has insinuated for some time that it is impossible to build any video codec without infringing on at least some of their patents.
Then I guess it's time for some anti-trust litigation ...