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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."
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.
It was, after all, inevitable. Do they not feel urgently threatened by WebM? (Do they have any reason to feel threatened?)
Give it a week, we may turn off the US government and be done with all this patent/megacorp crap.
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
A professional troll, who keeps posting hatchet-jobs stories about Google/Android only to have them promptly rebuffed.
That's what Google did, they bought On2 (who had been making codecs for 10 years or so without getting sued). I'll believe it when a court rules that a patent actually applies, there is too much for MPEG LA to gain from FUDing VP8 and almost nothing from having an actual patent pool.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
that is why they don't offer any type of indemnification to parties who choose to bet on the codec.
No, they don't offer any type of indemnification because patent trolls file bullshit patents like claiming a "buy now" icon in your app infringes on a patent regarding two-way customer feedback. At this rate, whoever has that patent on amusing a cat with a laser pointer has a solid case against WebM. It's impossible to defend against all the bullshit.
If the patent system wants to continue down this road, then the patent laws need to be revised that if anyone brings a patent case against someone, and they're found to not infringe on the patent, the patent holder owes double the defense's court fees and lawyer costs. Triple if the plaintiff tries to bail out after a Markman Hearing told them their patent doesn't mean what they want it to mean, and there's no way in hell that it's being infringed on.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
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.
who is surprised that WebM steps all over patents associated with h.264
Objection. The correct sentence here is "who is surprised that MPEG-LA claims that WebM steps all over patents controlled by MPEG-LA".
Given that WebM was specifically designed to not infringe any patents, I for one would be very surprised if it "steps all over" a large number of patents.
Sadly, I would not be surprised if Google lost a lawsuit over some patent that someone claims covers WebM. But that's because there are so many patents, and stuff happens in lawsuits.
The one and only argument I have ever seen in favor of WebM is that it doesn't have licensing restrictions.
Isn't that enough?
The basic pitch for WebM is "not as good as H.264, but you are free to use it". If you need the best possible video encoder and are willing to abide the the licensing restrictions and fee schedules of H.264, you use H.264. If you are Debian, and you only ship free software that isn't patent-encumbered, you ship WebM and not H.264. This isn't rocket surgery.
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.
Your point about H.264 being available in open source is accurate, but pointless. Your second point is correct if we agree that the word "substantially" covers a lot of differences. The differences make H.264 the better encoder.
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?
Because patents aren't judged by this "substantially" word you used. Patents cover specific things. On2 seems to have studied patents to figure out what they couldn't do, and found ways to do things that work almost as well without being covered by the patents.
The dangers here are that On2 overlooked a patent or otherwise made a mistake; or that a court would rule that On2 skated too close to the line. There is no danger that a court will say "WebM is substantially doing the same thing as H.264, so all the H.264 patents apply." You didn't really mean to imply the situation was that simple, did you?
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.
There is one major difference: the patents on H.264 are not just about to expire. I did a quick Google search and found that you would have to wait until 2025 to use H.264 for free.
If you use a patented format, you have to get a patent license. The owners of the patent license get to dictate the terms of the license.
Google, who owns and runs YouTube, doesn't want to build its business around H.264, because then when it is time to renew the licenses, the terms or fees could become Draconian.
Google doesn't want to build YouTube around an old, lousy video coder that happens to be free, because the users won't be happy their videos load slowly and look horrible; and Google has to pay for the bandwidth.
So: WebM. Not as good as H.264, but nobody can use it to tell Google "you now have to give us big large huge royalties on your use of this video coder". They can predict their future licensing costs (zero), and their bandwidth costs aren't horrible and the user experience is good.
WebM benefits everyone except for the people who own H.264 patents. And they will still make money on H.264; they just won't be the only game in town anymore. They want very much to be the only game in town and charge whatever they feel like charging. I don't understand why you are so keen on this idea.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Given that WebM was specifically designed to not infringe any patents, I for one would be very surprised if it "steps all over" a large number of patents.
WebM was not developed within an ISO recognized standards development organization. It never had a hope of being patent-free: the process was not open, not due-process, and for that reason and others the folks who might have been willing to donate their IP to the effort were not properly motivated.
There is one, and only one video codec that was developed in an open standards process specifically to be non-royalty, and that is JPEG 2000 Part 1 aka ISO/IEC 15444-1. During the development process of JPEG 2000 Part 1, an agreement was reached with over 20 large organizations holding many patents to allow use of their intellectual property in connection with JPEG 2000 without payment of license fees or royalties.
That is a major reason why JPEG 2000 is the basis of Digital Cinema.
Why no mention of Apple? Or Microsoft? They are both members of MPEG-LA, not to mention other sleazy organizations.
There are about thirty AVC/H.264 licensors, most of them global industrial giants like Mitsubishi, Philips and Toshiba. AVC/H.264 Licensors
There are about 1,030 H.264 licensees. AVC/H.264 Licensees
H.264 is theatrical production, Blu Ray, broadcast, cable and sattelite distribution. Medical, industrial and military applications. There is no such thing as an HDTV set or set top box that doesn't support H.264.
WebM is, well, WebM.
Google is an H.264 licensee. Google is hedging its bets.
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."
WebM was not developed within an ISO recognized standards development organization. It never had a hope of being patent-free: the process was not open, not due-process, and for that reason and others the folks who might have been willing to donate their IP to the effort were not properly motivated.
Neither was Vorbis. Vorbis has been used in huge projects by huge companies for over a decade. Why has it remained royalty-free? Why doesn't VP8 similarly have "a hope" of remaining royalty-free? Until the MPEG LA or one of the companies that allegedly hold patents essential to VP8 have something substantive to show there is no proof that VP8 infringes any patents. All the MPEG LA is doing now is what they've always done since the launch of WebM: scaremongering.
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
Neither does MPEG-LA
Now, be fair to Florian. You make him sound like some partisan hack who only posts wrong stories about Google / Android. Give him his due: he's consistently wrong about everything.
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