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Nokia Officially Lists Patents Google's VP8 Allegedly Infringes
An anonymous reader writes "Google just settled video codec patent claims with MPEG LA and its VP8 format, which it wants to be elevated to an Internet standard, already faces the next round of patent infringement allegations. Nokia submitted an IPR declaration to the Internet Engineering Task Force listing 64 issued patents and 22 pending patent applications it believes are essential to VP8. To add insult to injury, Nokia's declaration to the IETF says NO to royalty-free licensing and also NO to FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory) licensing. Nokia reserves the right to sue over VP8 and to seek sales bans without necessarily negotiating a license deal. Two of the 86 declared IPRs are already being asserted in Mannheim, Germany, where Nokia is suing HTC in numerous patent infringement cases. A first VP8-related trial took place on March 8 and the next one is scheduled for June 14. In related Nokia-Google patent news, the Finns are trying to obtain a U.S. import ban against HTC to force it to disable tethering (or, more likely, to pay up)."
"What Nokia is doing here is simply the normal course of business if a patent holder (Nokia) does not share the vision of another company (Google) with respect to a proposed standard and reserves all rights. What motivation could Nokia possibly have to donate something to a Google initiative? None. No motivation, no obligation, no license. Simple as that"
quoted from http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/03/setback-for-googles-vp8-nokia-refuses.html
Almost every single link in the summary leads to fosspatents.com, home of the infamous shill Florian Mueller. I guess I'll wait for more credible sources, thanks.
I don't recall there ever being a patent argument in any of the SCO cases. All I recall are copyright infringement claims.
....Microsoft paid SCO $6M (USD) in May 2003 for a license to "Unix and Unix-related patents", despite the lack of Unix-related patents owned by SCO.
Wikipedia agrees with this.
From the previously linked article:
SCO has not claimed patent infringement, as according to the US Patent and Trademark Office database, no AT&T or Novell patent was ever assigned to SCO.
If you are aware of SCO owned patents, please do tell.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
I know I am not supposed to feed it, but just in case...
Second, When MPEG LA first announced the VP8 pool formation, a rush of companies applied to be in the pool, partly because everyone wanted to see what everyone else had. That gave way to some amount of disappointment. And by 'some amount' I mean 'rather a lot really, more than the MPEG-LA would care to admit.'
Eventually, things whittled down to a few holdouts. Those '11 patent holders' do not assert they have patents that cover the spec. They said '_may_ cover'. The press release itself repeats this. Then these patent holders said 'and we're willing to make that vague threat go away for a little cash'. Google paid the cash. This is what lawyers do.
That's why it's a huge newsworthy deal when companies like NewEgg actually take the more expensive out and litigate a patent. It is always more expensive than settling, even if you'd win the case, and very few companies are willing or able to do it. Google was probably able, but not willing.
As for the quality stuff, WebM is close enough that it doesn't matter. We could argue details of that point, but the real reason Google is doing this is because the use cases for a web-centric codec are VERY different than the use cases for Hollywood and broadcast media. For example, web programmers don't care about encoding speed, we care about battery usage on cell-phones.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
That's when they dumped the world's most popular phone OS and their internal modern OS development projects for Windows Phone
When they dumped Symbian it was the *FORMER* world's most popular phone OS - Android had already dethroned Symbian when Nokia switched to Windows Phone.
No. Android was not even close to Symbian at that time.
As for MeeGo - would it have taken off? Maybe, but probably not. And the hardware it launched with was decidedly not modern at the time, which was perhaps a reason Nokia killed it. If they couldn't keep up with SoC developments, they would never manage to catch up to the competition.
Meego hat much better changes than Windows Phone (which did not take off and still does not sell anywhere close to what Symbian was selling in the past
in a much smaller market.). What ever you are mumbling here about SoC development does not make any sense considering that Linux supports much more
hardware than Windows Phone.
You are kidding right? The Maemo / Meego N900 and N97 received great reviews by people who actually used them.
Pity there was fuck all advertising and then Elop came along.
Since you said it:
Dell just went private because they have LOST so much share they didn't want to stay public. Looks like it was Mike that was paying back the stockholders,.. Not Steve, ouch.
Lenovo, IBM outsourced PC maker that IBM finally just gave up trying to make money on.
HP has bought Compaq and several other brands trying to stay solvent making PCs and gone through how many CEOs?
Lastly, Samsung and Acer are only on the game because they WERE the CHEAP LABOR 10 years ago, and now as OEMs they had enough parts and/or assembly tied up to bring their own brand when the First String players all went under. They are bodies and screwdrivers, nothing more.
Of this whole list only two companies (HP & Dell) have ever had any input at all into WRITING SOFTWARE that is important enough to Microsoft Windows to make the copyright blurb. The rest of the parties build boxes and put its good enough effort into making the machines boot up properly.. Microsoft or chipmakers do all the rest. Only Dell and HP were ever vaguely "partners" the rest were BENEATH MS customer status a very long time they built boxes.