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MPEG LA Says 12 Parties Have Essential WebM Patents
suraj.sun tips this report from the H Online:
"The hopes that the VP8 codec at the heart of Google's open source WebM video standard would remain unchallenged in the patent arena are diminishing after the MPEG LA says 12 parties hold patents that its evaluators consider essential to the codec. ... No VP8 patent pool has been formed yet; the MPEG LA says it met with the patent holders in late June and is 'continuing to facilitate that discussion' but the decision to form a pool is up to the patent holders. ... Google responded to the MPEG LA's interview saying it is 'firmly committed to the project and establishing an open codec for HTML5 video' and noting the April launch of the WebM CCL, a community cross-licencing agreement for essential WebM related patents."
Let's just turn off the internet and be done with it.
The parties involved are as yet unnamed and MPEG LA told patent analyst Florian Mueller that "confidentiality precludes [MPEG LA] from disclosing the identity of the owners".
This smells like more bullshit extortion.
Who is the Florian Mueller mentioned in the article?
It was, after all, inevitable. Do they not feel urgently threatened by WebM? (Do they have any reason to feel threatened?)
Google has zero credibility when it comes to promises of "open standards." They've hung their entire Android ecosystem out to dry and abandoned its partners to fend for themselves against patent holders.
WebM is most likely toxic and has an uncertain future. Google knows this and that is why they don't offer any type of indemnification to parties who choose to bet on the codec.
This "Google says it's open, therefore it's open" nonsense has to end.
If Google and others were to buy out or develop patent-free less-efficient codecs that get the job done, AND push them in preference to non-free codecs, we could have the benefits of widely-used free codecs, albeit with a bit of inefficiency.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
When is Google pulling h.264 support out of Chrome? I just did a new install on a previously Chrome-less Windows box, and it handled an h.264-only <video> element just fine.
I knew the Mac version of Chrome still played h.264, but I'm not sure if it's relying on its own internals or on the OS in that case.
#DeleteChrome
Astroturfing much?
I too would welcome a format that isn't shit like H.264. Preferably something we can all use.
And previous versions of Windows can have it added with codec packs. Chrome could well use the media layer in Windows for playback of any formats it does not support internally (it would make sense to do so).
Why no mention of Apple? Or Microsoft? They are both members of MPEG-LA, not to mention other sleazy organizations.
Nathan's blog
Who does this surprise? And I'm not talking about patent trolls or other attacks just looking to make a quick buck. I mean who is surprised that WebM steps all over patents associated with h.264 and other video standards? Anyone?
The one and only argument I have ever seen in favor of WebM is that it doesn't have licensing restrictions. That's it. From a code point of view h.264 is at least as open source seeing as many of the best tools and compressors are (and always have been) open and in many cases free. WebM doesn't do things significantly different from a technical point of view or an implementation point of view. It is substantially the same technology.
So if you have two projects that are effectively identical, but one has licensing restrictions on some streaming content and the other doesn't. Why would patents that cover one not cover the other?
This was always a stupid, meaningless fight. Everyone big enough to ever care about future licensing issues is big enough that it is meaningless. Everyone else is too small to bother. And all the implementation and tools have been Open Source from the start.
This stuff is like the JPG and GIF patents. Made zero real world impact and by the time everyone was finished arguing over them the patents had already expired. This is meaningless in-fighting.
They should make a new rule. If you don't immediately(reasonable amount of time, 1-2 months?) sue another company once you found out they've made a product based on your patent, you give up any rights to said patent.
You shouldn't be able to sit on it and wait for it to be more "lucrative" to sue.
Google checked all this out. Before they bought On2, they got to see all their IP, all their sutff (under NDA of course) as is standard practice for buyouts. Also, after they bought them, they took some time to turn VP8 in to WebM. During that time you really think they didn't do a through checking of patents that might apply? Also consider that Google is the best of the best at searching and data mining. They probably found everything.
My bet is they concluded that any or all of the following are true:
1) WebM does not infringe on any of the legit video patents out there.
2) That any patent WebM does infringe on is one that can be showed to be invalid via prior art.
3) That anyone who has a valid patent, Google has a more damaging counter patent(s) and thus they'll have to back down.
I cannot believe that Google ran in to this without doing good research. I also find it easy to believe that MPEG-LA is grasping at straws, particularly given how long it has taken and the lack of specifics.
And previous versions of Windows can have it added with codec packs.
How many fake antivirus "products" masquerade as codec packs?
Chrome could well use the media layer in Windows for playback of any formats it does not support internally (it would make sense to do so).
That would have two drawbacks:
patents aren't judged by this "substantially" word you used
"Substantially" in patentese is called the doctrine of equivalents. Perhaps that's what you were thinking of when you mentioned the possibility "that On2 skated too close to the line."
But on whom is the burden of proof that the patent holder sat on his rights? If on the alleged infringer, then a small business may not be able to afford to claim this equitable defense.
For all those bashing Mozilla and Firefox for not supporting H.264 I have to say HA.
Firefox did the right thing for turning it down regardless if it is part of HTML 5 due to patent reasons. Anyone saying "No, the MPAA are nice guys who would never sue us and the Firefox users are ideological socialists" have been proven that patents indeed suck.
http://saveie6.com/
And that is how patents are promoting progress. A company makes a clean room afford to come up with a new algorithm and tries in it's best to identify and not use any patents, and another company buys it and is releasing the algorithm under a free license to improve the life of everyone.
The only way to advance in the field of video codes is a) be the lucky company which is in the patent pool or b) wait until all patents expire. How is that suppose to promote the technology again?
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
Last ditch effort by a failing company...
Since the Mpeg2 patents are running out of time and that is Mpegla's bread and butter they need to find a new round of patents to keep their 44 employees fed.
It's interesting how attitudes have changed.
I remember how, in the 1990s, the Unisys LZW patent was such a big deal that an alternative to GIF (PNG) was created, promoted, and support for it added to web browsers.
Now, when we're talking about video in the 2010s, software patents are apparently such a non-issue that many people advocate going with H.264, despite patent restrictions. This while court battles are being fought over patents by some of the same companies who hold H.264 patents. Personally, I say we should have at least one standardized, supported video format that is not patent-encumbered. That way, we have somewhere to run if need be, and perhaps that will actually prevent the patent holders from going after us. It seems to have worked so far.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
as a developer, i used to relish the idea of creating a new product. Now, I wonder if I should ever post another one; I just cringe at the thought of all of the work I will put into it and will potentially face many lawsuits and pay out a lot in royalties to someone who did not contribute any work to my project, all because the US government granted a patent on what to me is a rather obvious idea. Worse yet, the more complex it is, the more likely I am to infringe. And even worse, if I make my project open source, I increase my risk dramatically since my methods are exposed for all to review and claim that they infringe on some patent buried deep in the annuls of the USPTO database. How do we make the government see how terrible this is for innovation in the USA?
Please pardon my imprecision. A fake AV product that has been installed masquerades as AV software. The installer for a fake AV product masquerades as the installer of a codec pack.
This reminds me of the 235 Microsoft patents that Linux infringes on.
Presumably WebM will suffer the same fate that Linux did then?
For some, good is defined by small file size, everything else being equal.
For some, good is defined by fast encoding, everything else being equal.
For some, good is defined by fast decoding, everything else being equal.
For some, good is defined by the fidelity of the decoded image as compared to the pre-encoded image.
For some, good is defined by the visual appearance as seen by an average human observer.
For some, it's a combination of the above.
In other words, if you had codec A which had the best reproduction fidelity on the planet but took minutes per megapixel to encode and decode and a typical file size of 6+ bytes per pixel, and codec B which approximated JPEG with just short of enough compression that the human eye could detect "artifacts" within 2 seconds while looking at the image at "normal reading distance," some would say A was a better codec than B, and some would say B was better than A. They are both right. It depends on the application.
You can make similar comparisons among motion-picture codecs and audio codecs as well.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.