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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)."
Maybe then, the US Congress will finally take notice and do something serious about patent reform.
Enough of this shit. You want to know what hurts innovation? Shit like this. No one knows what petty (or even not petty) patents they're going to infringe upon if they try to make anything, so they just don't bother.
Nokia is now, by all extents, a Microsoft proxy.
Yuck. Kinda makes you wonder how many other companies MS will puppet in the same way before they go under.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Google said that Google Wave is the future of email.
Yeah. Right.
Can someone please change the "anonymous reader writes" to "The paid shill Florian Mueller? Thanks.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
How is consulting for Microsoft and Oracle working out?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I think at this point, we can all look back on their history and realize that patents suck. Their concept was noble... protect the new inventor from having his invention stolen by a large corporation. But in practice, that happens anyway. Whomever has the most money for lawyers wins. The inventor of something is completely irrelevant at this point. Patents are nothing more than a legal artifice used by corporations to siphon money from one another. So lets just give it up, drop patent law and see how it goes. It can't be any worse than what we have now.
Firstly, this is Microsoft vs Google, so why can't the summary be grown up enough to acknowledge this? Secondly, VP8 was originally a closed-source project, and the company behind this used the fact to illegally rip-off CODECs whose spec and mechanisms were published openly. When Google bought VP8, and made the specs and code-base available, it was immediately apparent that the CODEC was a VERY bad knock-off of MPEG4.
The payment Google made to MPEG LA was a direct admittance of this fact. There seems to be zero reason why Google should be able to offer VP8 at better terms than H264, unless Google always swallows at least the same cost that deploying H264 in similar circumstances would cost. This being so, and given that VP8 is a vastly worse CODEC than MPEG4 AVC, and AVC has a brilliant open-source video encoder called x264, and AVC is supported in hardware on every modern mobile computer, why on Earth would anyone wish to use VP8?
In an age of mobile computing, we don't need open-source solutions crippled by 'politics'. Instead, we need the best high efficiency computing solutions- solutions that respect the battery, not a bunch of junky useless abstraction layers that require watts to achieve what otherwise could be done with milliwatts. VP8 is a very poor solution that should be consigned to the dustbin of history (something Google seems to have little problem doing to so many of its other projects and purchases).
Wow! Back in 1999 after I purchased my first cellphone, one of the first things I did was to investigate how to connect it to my laptop to give me a mobile modem. Sure enough there was serial cable I could buy for it.
I don't care how early Nokia was to enter the mobile phone market. There is no way they should be able to patent any part this process. I'd rather have no patents at all than grant a 20 year monopoly to some company for tacking "on a mobile device" to some obvious idea like tethering.
We need real patent reform like:
* Eliminating Software patents
* Fix the "obviousness test" and throw out all the existing ones that fail to meet this standard.
* No patents granted to logical evolution of current technology like tethering
* Grant a theoretical patent (i.e. where invention has not yet been realized) for no more than 7 years
* Allow a patent extension/modification upon successful invention
* Mechanical and physics-technology patents should last no more than 15 years
Renaming the invisible product doesn't make it any less of a bullshit argument.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
Well, first, I'd think decades, surely, giving MS ample time to screw around; and second, I meant before the puppet companies go under. Caldera/SCO had lost something like 90% of its stock value a year or two before they started their campaign against Linux.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Methinks both the eric conspiracy and jcdr are correct in their assertions. Nokia of late, under Elop is has both business models in use at the moment: selling phones to the developing world *and* patent trolling.
This btw is the same guy that sold the Nokia headquarters building, while agreeing to lease it back long-term.
He closed several factories in Europe, sending production (and build-quality) to Asia.
He's has and is paid many millions, although he's only been with the company just a few years. Coincidentally he came from Microsoft with millions of MS shares in the bank. He's Ballmer's Tool.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
"Nokia's declaration to the IETF says NO to royalty-free licensing and also NO to FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory) licensing"
Good, NOKIA; just as you like. Shoot yourself into the foot or sign your own death-knell. From here on you are a NO-NO company, and I suggest to everybody in my circles to make a large stroll around any Nokia product and I will do so myself.
This calls for collective punishment.
DIE, NOKIA; DIE!
Country:US:Filing date:19.01.2001, Filing number:09/766035, Pub.number:20010017944, Grant number:NA
It's disgusting they have patents filed in 2001 that are still pending that means they have will have a monopoly on that particular invention until abotu 2030, due to a loophole in the patent law that states that if the patent takes longer than 2 years to grant .. the time until the actual grant date doesn't count. This allows companies to extract royalties for 30 to even 40 years, especially if they had other patents that were granted for a particular type of technology.
The US Patent Office is to blame for this mess!!!