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Audio and Video Patents Haunt Apple and Android
FlorianMueller writes "There seems to be no end to those smartphone patent suits. This week's special: audio and video patents that its owners claim are key to formats like MP3 and MPEG 2. The targets: Apple and Android. On Monday, Alcatel-Lucent subsidiary Multimedia Patent Trust filed a patent infringement suit in Southern California against Apple, LG (over 64 different phones including some Android-based ones), Canon and TiVo over four video patents. Fortunately for Apple and LG, none of the patents asserted against those two companies are likely to be in force by the time the judge decides, so there's no risk of an injunction. They may nevertheless have to pay for past damages. The same company once obtained a record $1.5 billion jury verdict against Microsoft but saw it slashed by a judge. And on Tuesday, Hybrid Audio LLC filed a suit in Eastern Texas, asserting a patent against various Apple products and certain Android-based products from HTC and Dell."
The MPEG working group patented those formats almost 20 years ago
Except for the Spectral Band Replication (SBR) extension for MP3pro and AACplus. That was developed and owned by a private company, so it's possible there are other components that are also privately owned, rather than MPEG owned.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
I can only hope so many patent lawsuits will be started so that the whole system implodes upon its own stupidity.. Seems to much to ask for lawmakers to not take money from the industry so this might be the only way left..
Those companies themselves have more than enough patents to fence off possibile competitors (coincedently they are competitors of eachother ;)). So I wouldn't be too sure about them getting sick of patents. Especially since they also have the means to defend themselves from patent trolls and can afford an army of lawyers to get the best out of these lawsuits.
Exactly. The worst (but very likely) scenario is a cartel of software giants all holding patents and having agreements with others but meaning that no small developer or new company could develop anything without being attacked with thousands of general patents they could not afford to contest,
I keep hearing people blame this shit on the lawyers, but I just don't buy it. Lawyers don't have 100% say in whether a company sues another company for patent infringement. The lawyers merely point this out to the people in charge (the CEO, board of directors, etc). THOSE are the guys pulling the trigger and making the final decision to open these bullshit lawsuits...the lawyers are just doing their jobs. And no, I am not a lawyer.
Money is being spent on innovation........
MPEG-LA explicitly claims to protect you only from its members. As far as I know, they mostly deliver on that. Now, exactly how forthright their salesweasels are about the fact that the MPEG-LA patent pool is not as exhaustive as commonly believed I don't know....
The entire trust is managed by IPValue, a firm with nothing but lawyers who look for ways to extract money from others based on their patent portfolio.
I quote:
"IPVALUE’s operations are powered by a best-in-class team of experts in IP licensing and negotiations, IP law, business, and technology. Throughout their professional careers, our team members have generated more than $3 billion from IP transactions"
They don't make anything. You send them your unused or unenforced IP, and they go get you money through licensing or litigation.
So, yes, I blame the lawyers.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
big corps are being targeted by other patent trolls.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
now we can see why google bought on2 and provided (eventually) a royalty-free license for anyone implementing free software versions of the VP8 algorithm.
also we can see why the BBC developed "DIRAC" several years ago by combining the best algorithms they could find from *expired* patents.
so when you have situations where both ends of the (video) conversation can be controlled, there do exist "ways out" that terminate the possibility for patent trolls to get at you. (such as, for example, youtube being controlled by google and eventually transmitting VP8-encoded video and also android and webkit having VP8 receiver CODECs) ... it's just that there is still a sticking-point (due to the amounts of money invested) where the "de-facto" standard comes out of an organisation where patents are the norm. so i think this is a good thing, ultimately, for these big players to be smacked about and to lose billions off their profit margins. perhaps they will start to pursue similar strategies that google has with VP8, and the BBC did with DIRAC.
I sue you
You sue me
We're a sue-happy family
With a great big suit
And lawyer from me to you
We'll make sure we sue you too.
http://www.betanews.com/article/MPEG-LA-wins-major-MPEG2-settlement-from-AlcatelLucent/1269898704
MPEG LA theoretically already dealt with it and Alcatel/Lucent has formally agreed to surrender all patents to them.
I am surprised that the lawsuit regarding these patents has been filed. In fact, I suspect that a "contempt of court" ICBM is already somewhere around the highest point of its trajectory and is dispensing suitable size warheads.
Even if it did not, such hiding of patents while participating in standard bodies is as per US law an antitrust matter. There is a significant body of precedent and most of it is not in favour of the companies which hid patents while participating in a standard body.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Blaming the lawyers is neither fair nor productive. The blame lies in a broken patent system that cripples innovation rather than promotes it. We need to change the laws such that software patents are not allowed. Blaming the lawyers is like shooting the messenger.
No one is say that the Ogg Vorbis people are hiding patents under a rug waiting for someone to fall into their clever trap. What is considerably more likely is that someone, somewhere has patent on something that looks vaguely like Ogg Vorbis, and either hasn't realized it yet or hasn't yet found a juicy enough target to shoot a lawsuit at.
Example: Android. Open Source and and unencumbered by any patents from its inventor, Google. Google can, and has, guaranteed that they have left Android as free as possible for others to make use of. Unfortunately Oracle thinks they have some patents applicable to the technology that is the base of Android. So Oracle is suing both Google *and* the phone manufacturers. Google can't guarantee that their technology is unencumbered by other people's patents, no more can Ogg Vorbis.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Software patents must die. Patents were never designed to protect ideas--especially mathematical ideas and a computer program is a mathematical idea that has been written down.
Copyright your code, treat it as a trade secret, but don't roadblock other developers from independently deriving their own mathematical ideas, however abstractly expresed. If you have code that you can link to a particular machine of yours, fine. But pure code must be free.
I see this thing as a ******* free speech issue. Mathematical speech is speech. So long as you're not copying somebody else's ******* speech, then you can say or write whatever the **** you want. This is ******* ******* America and it ****** me the **** off.
I am in the middle of this so let me comment. (I am not one of the parties being sued, I offer comment, and all of the below is public knowledge)
MPT is owned by Alcatel/Lucent. What is important to remember here is that Alcatel is a vendor of video techology as well as a patent owner and a member of MPEG-LA. When Alcatel bought Lucent they formed a company called MPT (multimedia patent trust) that is the warehouse for the patents owned by Lucent at the time. They did this literally days before consummating the deal with Alcatel in an attempt to hide those patents from their legal obligations to MPEG-LA. MPEG-LA called BS on this and counter sued them based on their original agreement with Alcatel which would have Alcatel turn over all essential patents for MPEG-2. Alcatel has done so, but MPEG-LA has no further jurisdiction over Alcatel beyond that original agreement. Most important however is that Alcatel is suing over MPEG-2, and h.264 use of the remaining patents. For MPEG-2 in particular the '377 patent is meaningless because by virtue of the fact that it is not a method used in MPEG-2 and it was not considered 'essential' to MPEG-LA/Alcatel in that lawsuit, so therefore is pretty much junk (filler). The rest of the patents are primarily h.264 related (and would similarly apply to xvid, divx, webm, etc..) so trust me when I say that MPT is far from finished in filing lawsuits. The M.O. of MPT is to contact these companies, offer them a license agreement, and on failure to reach that agreement, they file suit. So far they have filed against all of the major broadcasters based on distribution of media created in violation of those patents (encoding, decoding, collaboration), and now they are after the phone manufacturers (decoding). They are primarily after the large scale players right now but they are far from done.
As much as you may want to hate on MPEG-LA, this is not their fault, nor is it in their ability to solve. This is the dirtbag company known as Alcatel, the sole beneficiary of this lawsuit, who is creating tremendous amounts of pain here for all of the major players, and at the end of the day, it is a tax that you, the consumer will end up paying one way or another. We need MPEG-LA specifically because it puts an end to bullshit like this, we need for the judge(s) in this case to call enough and force Alcatel to join MPEG-LA otherwise this is going to be a very long, drawn out, and expensive fight that could only possibly benefit Alcatel and for sure will cost you money.
That's the first thing that came to my mind too. But the courts didn't decide in Rambus' favor. They decided that Rambus did violate JEDEC's rules for participation. Unfortunately JEDEC's rules didn't specify a punishment for a member violating its rules. Meanwhile the rules for violating patent law were very clear on their punishments under U.S. law.
Basically, hiding patents while participating in a standards body is not illegal per se. It's the fact that it violates the rules of the standards body which makes it illegal. But since that legality stems from the standards body's rules, the punishment also has to be specified in those rules. JEDEC didn't specify those punishments, so even though Rambus illegally violated their rules, there was no legal punishment they could impose on Rambus for that violation. At best, all they could get Rambus on was breach of contract, and rescind Rambus' membership in JEDEC. But that wouldn't affect any of Rambus' patents.