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DOJ Anti-trust Investigation of MPEG-LA
thomst writes "The Wall Street Journal's Thomas Catan reports that the Department of Justice has launched an anti-trust investigation of MPEG-LA's purported efforts to prevent Google's VP8 codec from widespread adoption. According to the article, the California Stare Attorney General's office is also investigating MPEG-LA for possible restraint of trade practices."
Of all the abusive monopolies they choose to go after, this is who they pick? Facepalm. Well, it's a start. I guess someone was late on their campaign donations.
HaHa
Anti-competitive? No way!
yeah
\o/
When the parties come to a quiet settlement out of the public eye, I can't wait for Thomas Catan's headline: "Settlers of Catan"
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
there's already several billion babys. how many freemasons? we'll have a vote then? how many babys is the 'correct' number to be in perfect balance with 'nature'? there's a powerful sentiment/intention afoot that those 'nature's' accountants? need to scratch that .5b # off their mistaken 'stone', right away. the bips stopped reading after that first 'commandment'. if there's more errors on there, might as well demolish it, & build an accurate one. could make a million baby play-date out of that project. see you there?
By Carl Teichrib:
The Georgia Guidestones, a massive granite edifice planted in the Georgia countryside, contains a list of ten new commandments for Earth's(?) citizens. The first commandment, and the one which concerns this article, simply states; Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
double yikes!@#$
Robert Walker, former chair of PepsiCo and Proctor & Gamble on water:
Water is a gift of nature. Its delivery is not. It must be priced to insure it is used sustainably.
Mikhail Gorbachev:
We must speak more clearly about sexuality, contraception, about abortion, about values that control population, because the ecological crisis, in short, is the population crisis. Cut the population by 90% and there arenâ€t enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage.â€
Jacques Cousteau UNESCO Courier 1991:
In order to save the planet it would be necessary to kill 350,000 people per day.
Jacques Cousteau, Population: Opposing Viewpoints:
If we want our precarious endeavor to succeed, we must convince all human beings to participate in our adventure, and we must urgently find solutions to curb the population explosion that has a direct influence on the impoverishment of the less-favoured communities. Otherwise, generalized resentment will beget hatred, and the ugliest genocide imaginable, involving billions of people, will become unavoidable.
Uncontrolled population growth and poverty must not be fought from inside, from Europe, from North America, or any nation or group of nations; it must be attacked from the outside & by international agencies helped in the formidable job by competent and totally non-governmental organizations.
David Rockefeller: Memoirs 2002 Founder of the CFR:
We wield over American political and economical institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as â€internationalists†and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political structure, one world, if you will. If thatâ€s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.
David Rockefeller, Co-founder of the Trilateral Commission:
We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine & other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promise of discretion for almost 40 years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plans for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. Thomas Ferguson, the Latin American Case Officer for the State Departmentâ€s Office of Population Affairs (OPA) (now the US State Dept. Office of Population Affairs, est. by Henry Kissinger in 1975): There is a single theme behind all our work -we must reduce population levels, said Thomas Ferguson, the Latin American case officer for the State Departmentâ€s Office of Population Affairs (OPA). Either they [governments] do it our way, through nice clean methods or they will get the kind of mess that we have in El Salvador, or in Iran, or in Beirut. Population is a political problem. Once population is out of control it requires authoritarian government, even fascism, to reduce it. The professionals, said
The US Department of Justice is going after the International Oraganisation for Standardization (ISO)'s Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) Licensing Agency (LA)?
Am I the only person who sees a problem here?
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Now can someone in government put two and two together and see the absurd situation software patents has caused? VP8 is supposed to be patent-free but everyone on the H264 side is calling it patent-encumbered anyway. The mere existence of patent trolls should be reason enough to get rid of the idea. You should be able to patent implementations, not ideas.
The point of software patents was to protect innovation. This should be a clear example that it is not, as VP8's adoption is supposedly slow because of the risk of violating other patents whose owners won't come out of the woodwork until VP8 has enough market share to make a lawsuit nicely profitable. The whole thing is patently ridiculous.
The sheer amount of patent lawsuits and now that even Google and Apple are teaming up against a troll is very telling. Software patents are not serving their intended purpose and it is obvious because no one wants to adopt VP8 because of the unknown threat. This is the stifling of innovation and is not protecting the patents of the 10 companies that may own patents to VP8 because no one wants to use them so they just become dead weight. What good is an idea if it can't be used?
Software is a fickle thing. Your idea may have also been invented by someone and you just didn't patent it. This is the problem with software patents. The patents themselves can be very vague and cover a whole host of ideas. If the patent office has to pass more patents just to get rid of a backlog, perhaps it isn't the fault of the filers but the fault of the law.
While they're at it, they can investigate Google's VP8 for thieving of code from other codecs.
I thought that the DOJ anti-trust division had all been frozen in carbonite. Now, it appears that they are awake and may actually do some good. When they are done with this, there is a certain search engine they might want to look at...
basically they are a bunch of parasite lawyers living off software patents
But that still doesn't necessarily make them "trolls" in the sense of nonpracticing entities. A lot of MPEG-LA members sell copies of encoders that they have developed. I'd bet a lot of MPEG-LA members are also in MPEG itself.
The point is to give their holders a preference. True, it was intended for individuals who needs a while to ramp an idea up to a business, not multinational corporate conglomerates who house thousands like a weapons stockpile. Perhaps, the answer is that we do not afford corporations the same rights as individuals. The Supreme Court recently ruled to that effect.
I told you Google was working with the government! This just proves it.
--- Glenn Beck
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
This seems like a reasonable statement, at first, but then I wondered what makes video codecs so special. I mean, why single them out, when almost anything has at least the possibility of infringing on a patent? I think that's pretty much the point of having a patent pool, these days. If someone claims that you're infringing on their patents, you can search through your collection of thousands of patents, in order to find something that they are infringing upon.
Now, I'm not necessarily an anarchist wanting to abolish intellectual property, but I do believe that patents have become an embarrassing travesty, thanks to the past fifteen or twenty years' worth of crappy patents (which are just now beginning to fall out of protection). When you can't even write an open video codec without industry insiders calling into question your very algorithms, there's something wrong, be it with the insiders (spreading FUD in order to kill the competition) or the laws (which have made competition impossible).
Anyways, I'm sure a hundred other people will say the same thing, since this is Slashdot, and we looove to complain about intellectual property laws, so I'll add a little something extra: what I've thought about as a replacement for our current system. How's this sound?
Something being international doesn't mean it is outside of the law of a given country. Heck for that matter most large companies are international, they have offices all over the world. That doesn't mean they get to say "You can't pass any laws on us or take us to court! We are International!" Do business in the US, you are subject to US law. Same deal with MS and EU anti-trust rulings.
However the parent is completely correct. MPEG is the group that designs compression formats and so on. MPEG-LA is a group that grabs licensing fees.
Basically the MPEG standards created were covered by a whole heapin' helpin' of patents from all kinds of different companies. So these companies got together and decided that they way to deal with this and make money on it was to pool them. You put your patents in a pool controlled by MPEG-LA, who then handles the licensing of the technology. You then get your cut of the money.
Has nothing at all to do with the development of anything.
"the California Stare Attorney General's office is also looking into MPEG-LA for possible restraint of trade practices."
There, fixed it for ya!
It's about time the Justice Dept. gave value for money.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Yes they do. MS get rid of Linux, Apple get rid of Android.
Or don't you think that having competing products in the field reduces their profits?
Nice - now Google gets free DoJ investigations.
Do no evil huh?
Google saying something is anticompetitive is laughable. Types 'maps' into Google Search and what do you get? Google Maps. Ok, maybe they have the highest score using whatever Googles uses to rank pages. Now type in 'email' into Google Search. What do you get? gMail. Is gMail the top email provider? Not by a long shot. So if Google wants to talk about anti competitive practices, they have 90% of the search market and funnel people to their own services even if another service should be ranked higher.
..in addition to MPEG-LA (Los Angeles).
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I am glad the DOJ and CA Attorney General are launching this anti-trust investigation, and I hope MPEG LA is prevented from any further action against the VP8 codec. Without open competition, capitalism does not work. No group should have the right to block alternative technology formats whether they are free & open source or not. We must be vigilant about this as citizens because otherwise monopolies will destroy our democracy and the ability of new companies to compete and innovate. After reading this article, I am going to look into the VP8 codec and see about using it.
I'm not fan of the current patent system, but they're not just about protecting the money spent developing the patented concept but the profit that can be obtained from exclusive access to it.
The money invested in developing a patentable idea is just that, for the most part -- a business investment. People with money to invest are looking for some kind of return on their investment -- not just the money they invested, but MORE than they invested, an interest percentage.
I like your idea, but you would have to raise the cost of buying out the patent to some multiple of the invested amount.
I think another idea that would help a lot would be a "mandatory sunset without marketed implementation" requirement that would set a time limit (5 years? 2 years?) within which the patent would have to be brought to market as part of a product or the patent would become public domain.
This would bring a pretty quick end to most patent trolls, since they typically wielding patents that were never turned into products, and the system is supposed to be protecting industrial innovation, not creating licensing monopolies. Even big "patent portfolio" companies with active products would feel some heat -- ie, Company A patenting some concept they don't use only to hinder Company B's product development or simply hoarding patents to hinder competitors generally.
[this is my personal viewpoint]
I'm all for people making money on their intellectual property (IP). And every modern standards development organization (SDO) requires the disclosure of IP by standards setting participants.
But it is the IP held by non-participants unknowingly infringed upon by standards that are the big cause of FUD on the adoption of new standards.
ANSI is the the official U.S. representative to ISO/IEC and accreditor of US SDOs . Not all US standards become ANSI "National Standards", but many important ones do.
I believe that upon ANSI elevating a standard from one of its accredited SDOs to a National Standard, there should be a legally defined process that begins a time period wherein all IP owners must "put up or shut up" regarding the standard, i.e. they must declare whether their IP is potentially infringed by a National Standard.
After that time window is over, patent or other IP infringement cases can not be brought for the use of that IP in applications of that National Standard.
I'd be happy for that window to be 1 year or 2 years to ensure that IP holders have enough time to be able to monitor publication of National Standards and properly analyze them, but no more than that.
I'm not a WIPO or international law expert, but it might be nice to extend this to at least a certain class of ISO/IEC standards as well (but perhaps only the important ones).
I think it is high time the government stepped in to challenge what amounts to a video format cartel.
These people, the ones who put patents on maths, algorithms, are part of people who should be processed for crimes against humanity.
You shouldn't be allowed to patent the way we think.
Cheers,
First, let's upgrade the patent clerks to "patent engineers", because that's what they should be, with appropriate qualifications and salary.
Don't know about patent clerks. But I understand that patent lawyers are already required to also be engineers. Have been for some time.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Since there is absolutely no way you could possibly verify this let alone 'know' this (unless you created an alternate reality where patents didn't exist and that only difference caused this one company to fail), your entire argument is predicated on something that is untestable.
But, it's a good thing we have patents, or we never would have inventions like the 'wheel'...right?