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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.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
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!
Microsoft. Basically, when Elop took over, Nokia became an MS Vassal. That's when they dumped the world's most popular phone OS and their internal modern OS development projects for Windows Phone, and why Windows Phone ads use Nokia phones. It's basically the same play they ran when they got SGI to start building NT workstations. And, not that far off from the investments in SCO to enable the fight against Linux. Note that the MS Vassal is actively using their patent portfolio specifically to fight one of Google's strategic plays, despite the fact that a phone vendor that has given up on OS development would probably do much better if they added Android to their phone portfolio.
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.
Nokia is now, by all extents, a Microsoft proxy.
Can someone please change the "anonymous reader writes" to "The paid shill Florian Mueller? Thanks.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Nokia has been in phone business and phone related software business since the start. One could argue that they started the business in the first place and would be at least partially right.
They most definitely hold at least some patents that came to be before google was formed. And a whole lot more from time after google was formed but before it purchased android.
The problem is how they are choosing to use them. Normally you'd just negociate a licensing agreement and be done with it. But here, they're actually patent trolling. "We don't share the vision and do not want to help". So we sue to block. Ouch.
That's not the way nokia of old got to be on top. Elop and his microsoftism shines through.
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.
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
Nokia is not a patent troll by any reasonable definition. They are a practicing entity who developed their own technology and has been in this from the beginning.
Patent trolls rarely sue to block. As non-practicing entities there would be no commercial reason for that sort of behavior.
This is going to be a mess unless Google just buys Nokia.
Nokia is not a patent troll by any reasonable definition.
This was certainly true for a long part of the Nokia history. But the actual Nokia is something that have lost an extremely large amount of connections with the Nokia "mobile phone world leader" of the past. We are now forced to take notice that the actual Nokia is more and more close to the definition of patent troll. The latest new just confirm this trend.
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?
Let's see I looked at the one patent filed in my country. Patent filed at 2001, granted in 2011, valid to 2021.
What I hate the most is these hidden patents which are first filed, but they delay it for as long as possible (so they also remain hidden) and 10 years (!) later they get granted and are valid an other 10 years.
VP7 is from 2005, VP6 is from 2003, VP5 is from 2002. All based on TrueMotion S created in 1995 or so.
New things are always on the horizon
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.
Don't kid yourself. That yacht is the form of the insanity that his anti-cancer and anti-boredom drugs caused. Ugly as sin.
All rites reversed 2010
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.
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!!!
When they dumped Symbian it was the *FORMER* world's most popular phone OS
That depends on when you count the dumping. Nokia had a problem that they had an OS kernel (EXA2) that was beautifully designed for mobile devices, but had a userland that was somewhat archaic and designed to work around hardware limitations that didn't really exist anymore. Their solution was to throw away the kernel and replace it with Linux. They'd already begun relegating Symbian to the low end before Android was released. They had multiple strategies internally, none of which was working and all of which were competing.
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