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Nero Files Antitrust Complaint Against MPEG-LA
hkmwbz writes "German technology company Nero AG has filed an antitrust complaint against the MPEG-LA, the company that manages the H.264 patent pool. Nero claims that the MPEG-LA has violated the law and achieved and abused 100% market share, by, among other things, using 'independent experts' that weren't independent after all, not weeding out non-essential patents from the pool (in fact, it has grown from the original 53 to more than 1,000), and retroactively changing previously-agreed-on license terms."
Good luck guys, may the force be with you.
Any non-zero fee is bad for free (as in beer, and as in speech) software. When you have no price you're charging, then you can't really add in any fee on top of your price.
It basically means that if you want to distribute software, you have to implement a means to SELL it. If you goal is to distribute software free of charge, then even a $0.01 licensing fee totally cripples that.
A better solution for "free as in beer" software would be to make the fee a percentage of the sale price, though that still is somewhat problematic from the "free as in speech" angle.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
The problem is principle, even if I use totally clean-room reverse-engineering without even taking one look at their patents, I still am guilty of patent violations, how?
Not to mention their patents become so broad that if you want to create your own compressed video standard you still have to license it out.
Really, they should license certain software for $2 and if you use clean-room reverse engineering, you should be perfectly entitled to distribute and use it. And if you make a different standard, you should be able to distribute and use that without fear of patent lawsuits.
Any company that does not make use of their patent "portfolio" to advance art and sciences is an abuser of patent laws plain and simple.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
There are numerous other terms attached to MPEG licening, including requirements that you not facilitate the infringement of copyrights, your device respects HDCP, etc, etc. You either do as they say and pay their fee or they sue you. Sounds like extortion to me.
May the Maths Be with you!
If Vinny and Guido show up at your business with a baseball bat and remark that you have really unbroken knees, and it would be a shame if anything happened to them, it doesn't really matter if they demand $2 or $50. Once they show up at your business, willing to make threats about how they need a cut of the sales of a business that they may not have contributed anything to, they have gone too far. MPEG-LA are, at this point, basically operating under exactly the same business model as Mafia running a protection racket. They just invested enough in politics to make their game somehow legal.
Zomg, what will the pirates do if they can't burn DVDs??
OK, for real though, here's the other side of the debate.
Higher end tech is too expensive - BD-ROM is the current highest end consumers can buy, but the entrance cost to using that technology is sufficiently high that Joe Middle Class Consumer with his wife and 2.5 kids and a mortgage can't afford it.
Why buy a BD-R or flash drive when you only have 1 GB of photos to give to Aunt Mabel, anyway? A blank DVD only costs a few cents.
Burning CDs to listen in your car is cheaper than buying an mp3 player. Those are still a luxury item, especially with the outrageous cost of the kits you have to use to hook them up to your car. (Let's face it - I'm not going to buy a luxury car just because it plays mp3s.) Hitting the next track button on your stereo is safer than fiddling with your handheld mp3 player, too.
CD/DVD-ROM discs will outlast a frequently-used USB drive. I've had some Flash devices that lasted, some that didn't make it 2 years.
In the business world, $100,000+ software is still distributed on CD and DVD, or an image thereof. Drivers for certain brands of servers are downloaded as ISO format, so you are supposed to burn them. Firmware drivers come in bootable ISO form now. Yes, I know, 7-zip can unpack all of the above. But when you're setting up an OS on a new server or zeroing a disk or recovering a failed machine, you usually need a disc because they DON'T boot off the USB ports.
USB drives cannot normally be write-protected without arcane magik tricks, and not many can be write-protected at all. Read-only media is more secure when you're up against malware. This is important when performing security breach remediation, such as antivirus on a live system.
And now, for Slashdot brownie points: Linux installs are available as CD/DVD ISO images. ;) Of course you could use USB for this, but when you can give someone Linux for essentially free (CDs are dirt cheap) how could you go wrong there?
I've seen people using floppies and tapes as recently as last year. So, just because something's obsolete on the cutting edge, doesn't mean hordes of people aren't still using it.
Must be nice to have the money and time and modern hardware to get rid of optical media!! :)