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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.
The making-and-selling-mobile-phones business model hasn't been working so well for Nokia of late. so maybe they're switching to SCO's business model.
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Ah, the last gasps of a dying company, and a dying way to make money. Good riddance to both.
I have a feeling Nokia has changed it's attitude compared to a few years ago.
It makes me wonder, is it (the) new management or major investors that have caused this change or would any company have to stand up this way?
Or is Nokia simply so advanced others can only keep up by 'borrowing' their tech...
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
So Nokia apparently has some trash "routing data from one network to another ON A MOBILE DEVICE" patent, and Florian Mueller is breathless about it. What's new?
Google said that VP8 is patent free!
It's truly remarkable that a video codec can actually contain that many patents. Then consider that according to Nokia there are 86 infringing patents. Are they patenting 1+1=2? What's going on here?
What else do you think Microsoft's slave can do?
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.
SCOkia is going belly up!
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.
Surely with VP8 being around for about 5 years now iirc any pending patents must have been lodges after VP8?
Can Nokia expect to win when the software they are trying to shut down with patents is usable as prior art to invalidate the same patents?
[The Universe] has gone offline.
Is M$ behind this ? No idea, Is it the last gasp of a company in it's death throws having drunk from the poisned m$ chalice ? No idea, Will i buy another nokia product ? Never ever ever again....
4.5 years after VP8 was released.
3 years after VP8 was made open source and freely available
Can someone please change the "anonymous reader writes" to "The paid shill Florian Mueller? Thanks.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
...if it hasn't already (in the US) Assuming it's a valid patent to begin with. 1995 was a long time ago.
Oh yes...that company that used an SLR to fake their smartphone performance. Now I remember.
When I first read this, I thought to my self, what does a javascript engine implementation have to do with video encoding? TLAs are annoying, often ambiguous, and easily confused when similar. I wish they would die, to a certain extent. I'm working an a project currently where a certain TLA refers to both and external system we're interfacing with, and a separating 3rd-party library we're using. To say this causes confusion would be and understatement.
Suck my big dongle.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Since Google have patents in VP8, they cannot have said it was patent free.
I think you're a fuckwit.
How is consulting for Microsoft and Oracle working out?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'm more than happy to let Nokia claim a patent on tethering a cell phone with a cable to a PCMCIA card. Doesn't Nokia have any patents with vacuum tubes?
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).
... Nokia has gone south once Americans took over ownership and decided to put Eflop at helm.
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
1 + 0 = 1 ON A PHONE
1 + 1 = 2 ON A PHONE
1 + 2 = 3 ON A PHONE
1 + 3 = 4 ON A PHONE
etc
2 + 0 = 2 ON A PHONE
2 + 1 = 3 ON A PHONE
2 + 2 = 4 ON A PHONE
2 + 3 = 5 ON A PHONE
etc
The 86 patents infringed were just the first installment. The lawyers took a break in filing the paperwork because they were running low on crack.
A mobile computer is still a computer. A mobile phone is a device containing a computer. What the tethering device is doing is not different from what any router does, and what any router does used to be done by general computers since the advent of the tcp/ip protocol suite. Or can you patent routing with a pink computer, declaring that after today, pink computers are a different kind of device? Or patent routing with a computer having a wooden case? (But that patent would not be worth much since few people need to put their computers inside wooden cases.) Or patent routing with a computer having sub x-nanometer techonoly (substitute a suitable number for 'x'), in case you are the first to achieve sub x-nanometer feature chips? What about patenting multiplication of numbers using a computer having sub x-nanometer technology?
There is no substitute for common sense. Especially, no body of rules will do.
A blog post from "Diary of an X.264 developer" http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377 looked at VP8 and noted a number of probable infringements. The killer argument, though, was this:
So while I don't like Microsoft's business practices or Nokia's for that matter, the idea that VP8 is patent-free seems rather optimistic.
This isn't going to go well for Nokia. Already no one wants their products and Microsoft has already hinted they'll abandon Windows phone next year. Nokia is now a patent troll with no other business model. Well, it has a business model, but it's so broken it will never recover. Hiring that nitwit Elop. Elost!
Both Nokia and HTC are under serious threat from their competitors. They can survive if they merge. The resulting hybrid can put out the Windoze phones - which no one buys right now - and Androids which can be a credible alternative to Samsung.
Plus they should stop patent cases...the issue with the patent trolling / litigation is not the cost of lawyers, it is the shift of focus of upper / senior management / C Level from innovation and better products to courtrooms. We all have - including the evil and socio-path chief executives - only 24 hours a day.
The recent troubles of Apple (to an extent) can be attributed to Steve Jobs shift of focus from 'better rounded corners' to 'lawyers defending rounded corners'. Its a pity Jobs died before he could experience his idiocy first hand...all we have is the great beautiful multimillion dollar Philip Starck yatch and lawyers defending rounded corners. Tim Cook is an unlucky bugger...he is sloshing in the poop Jobs left behind as his legacy.
Tat Tvam Asi
How you can patent speech. Because, isn;t code speech, or was PZ wrong?
I used to be
"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!
I used to have tons of respect for Nokia. Then one of their employees got VLC knocked off the Apple App Store for incredibly selfish reasons (certainly didn't help VLCs market share). Now becoming a patent bully in the footsteps of their OS provider. Not pretty.
That title really is making my head hurt. I reallys hates that.
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!!!
my current phone is from you. My next one dead sure won't be.
An ex-customer.
Basically, the company is obliged by its shareholders to make money in any legal way. Milking the patent system is one such way. The answer is to fix the system.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
Seriously, other than a few models Nokia phones have been patently awful. Every project Noka has bought out has ended up turning to absolute crap. They make awful alliances with awful companies. Now pulling tricks with vague algorithm patents? Fucking die Nokia. On and your boots suck too. Just spare us and give up on everything.
This is Microsoft, pure and simple.
If you like me does not like the situation - boycott nokia products.
This fine habit amongst fosstards that you guys are displaying here is one of the reasons I started to hate you and root for big proprietary companies, like MS, Adobe... I used to appreciate free software's goals, but now I just want *you fanboys* to feel anguish and despair, so I actually rejoice when something gets wrong.
When reality doesn't suit your beliefs, you just deny it, or try to shoot the messenger. Everybody who doesn't agree with your religion is a troll, shill or idiot. Grow up, kids!It's so embarassing to observe you freetards.
You guys literally made me feel disgust and hate towards free software. Back in 2006, I was actually a user of OpenSUSE... but seeing your kind filling the internet with crap all the time, you really made me bitter.
...and I'll say it again. Burn in hell, Nokia. Finally. Please.
Just another example of why Slashdot needs to get rid of ACs, if they don't have the balls to stand by their comments they should probably STFU.
I'm posting AC because I can't be bothered to enable cookies. Not for Slashdot. I'd subscribe if there was a cookieless (and for that matter javascriptless) way of doing that.
The behaviour is certainly there.