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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."
I agree, in this case they should have gone straight for the root cause, Microsoft and Apple.
Their attempt at strangling VP8 by trying to build a pool of patent to sue the one owning it are by far the worst case of anticompetitive behavior i have seen since the browser wars.
HTTP/1.1 400
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
Of all the abusive monopolies they choose to go after, this is who they pick?
They've got to start small and work their way up (one can hope). After all, they're really out of practice - the big cartels and abusive monpopolies would eat the DoJ for breakfast.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I agree, in this case they should have gone straight for the root cause, Microsoft and Apple.
Microsoft and Apple are two of the largest members of the MPEG-LA. They are the two best-known by the public. Going after MPEG-LA very much is going after Microsoft and Apple, but it's also going after all the other criminals involved in this extortion racket at the same time. I consider that to be positive.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
The MPEG-LA is not actually affiliated with MPEG or ISO.
The MPEG LA is *NOT* affiliated with the MPEG committee. They are a separate *COMPANY* that puts together patent pools for MPEG standards -- basically they are a bunch of parasite lawyers living off software patents, at least in my opinion.
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
That said, trolls operate under a bunch of different business models and with a number of overlapping motivations, including the motivation of excluding or taxing small competitors who need to implement standards. Moreover, anyone who tries to create a patent pool that supposedly covers OGG, VP8 etc just as they are released as royalty-free totally deserves that description, if you ask me.
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.
It's hard to think of a more clear cut example of supposed business rivals getting together to agree and enforce a common price.
Price fixing is a time honored practice in many industries. oil, steel, railroads, airlines and communications, all run by pirates who do challenge each other for top position, like in any other herd or flock of animals, but will never work against the whole..
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
No they are trolls, because every year they say how thankful we should be they decided not to charge us this year for the stuff they gave away for free last year.
Next year they will say the same thing. They have said it the last 2 years now that I know of. Oddly enough 2 years ago was when Google started dealing with VP8, and actually opening up those codecs.
Right now you have to pay to use H.264 every time you, encode, decode, stream, move, or look at the file. Only because MPEG-LA are such nice people they actually only charge you for encode, decode, and stream.
If you think your not paying, then you might want to take a closer look someone is paying it for you then raising the cost of doing business along the way.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
MPEG-LA does not believe VP8 infringes any of their patents, so they tried building/buying up a patent portfolio specifically to go after VP8. This is clearly anti-competitive and propably illegal. I personally think it is an act of extortion and MPEG-LA executives should be charged under RICO laws. But I'm not a lawyer and US justice system seems to do more to cover corporate executives (knowingly) illegal activities than to ensure justice overall. It 2008 financial crisis fiasco does not show that clearly than I don't know what is.
Missing the point. This is an anti-trust suit. A trust is when companies that should be competing conspire for monopolistic powers/purposes. If individual patent holders were behaving in a free-market way, they would each challenge individually, giving google the ability to pick and choose which patents to license or give royalties to, should anyone actually have an unexpired patent that pertains. Google would also have to option of altering VP8 to not infringe on any patents held by people who were asking too high a price. Doing so would require knowing the price.
Instead, we have the formation of a cartel that plans to bundle all patents together so the holders are no longer competing, but form an illegal trust. Granted it is probably a toothless one without any actual infringed patents -- but whether or not they actually have any goods is still unknown, so it doesn't matter -- the legal situation must be treated as if they do in fact have infringing patents, since it is their express purpose to gather them.
in the meantime they are using the prospect of this bloc of patent holders as a basis to go out and make declarative public statements before actually producing any evidence that they actually have any patents that were infringed. As they have done such, they may be already guilty of anti-trust behavior, because they have utilized the common asset of their bluff.
Someone had to do it.
Probably not but you should be.
At least where hightech is concerned this so called standards organizations have devolved into little more of substance than East Texan Patent trolls, they just hide behind their names and history for the sake of keeping a better face on it.
All MPEG-LA is really about is deciding who gets to play and who has to pay based on if you are lucky enough to be 1, a Mega Multinational, 2 part of their chosen boys club, and 3 friendly to their business interests. These organizations are not about facilitation of standards and interoperation but instread about collusion. They decide whats in the market place and how its offered, At least until another elephant like Goolge gets upset enough about it. It has to be someone like Google to even if it is "the people vs" becuase no AT-Gen would pay attention if some small opensource project came calling.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Actually, companies are free to implement h.264 WITHOUT involving the MPEG-LA. It's just that the company is now responsible for dealing with licensing the 1000+ patents from everyone themselves.
All the MPEG-LA does is provide a generic license of "Pay us $X per device and you'll be licensed to use all these patents". You are free to go after each and every patent holder separately.
Of course, there are advantages to going with MPEG-LA than doing it yourself, notably, dealing with 1000+ legal agreements is pretty difficult and time-consuming, and there's no guarantee that you can get it cheaper. Also, if you're dealing with one of your major competitors, they could simply deny you a license, or charge extra for it (MPEG-LA licensing is RAND).
Of course, I don't know what the MPEG-LA licenses are like, but they could also include clauses that say the license is only valid for h.264, and other codecs using the same things (VP8 is supposed to allow use of the same blocks has h.264) could very well require extra licensing because that block's license terms only cover h.264, not VP8, h.265, SuperCoolCodec, or whatever. This is less about the software decoders, but the hardware accellerators you'll need for VP8 to be used in mobile devices.
End result could very well be that you're paying for an h.264 license in order to do hardware accellerated VP8 decode.
If MPEG-LA believes that VP8 infringes, then they are well within their rights to question it.
I don't think that's the issue. It isn't that if someone has a patent that reads on VP8 they aren't allowed to enforce it. It's that the people who control the rights to VP8's primary competitor are trying to gain control over rights to VP8.
..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.
[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).