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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)."
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.
Well, the FUD strategy has been to never list the patents. If you actually do have patents there is no good reason not to list them. One of the big problems with software patents is exactly that they can be so broad that working around them is actually impossible.
Can someone please change the "anonymous reader writes" to "The paid shill Florian Mueller? Thanks.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
patent infringement is an almost certainty.
I'm not a lawyer, but I think I am "anyone who follows codecs" and I'm not as sure of this as you are.
A lot of patents are very narrow. Many of the famous software patents, like One-Click, are disturbingly broad, but many of the patents related to video compression are narrow. The VP8 strategy, as I understand it, was to study the patents and make sure that everything in VP8 was just different enough that it doesn't infringe.
This means that VP8 is an inferior codec compared to H.264; some of the patented techniques really are better. However, it should be a "good enough" codec for most purposes.
Their "work around" was to give identical technologies different names and put their fingers into their ears screaming "LA LA LA LA LA" denying any patent infringement.
-1, flamebait.
When they realized this wasn't going to work, Google finally licensed the patents from MPEG LA.
I don't purport to have a secret pipeline into Google management and be able to tell what they were thinking. Do you have such a secret pipeline?
An equally workable summary is: Google had an opportunity to throw a few dollars at MPEG-LA and end the FUD forever, and they did so. Even if Google was convinced they could win on the merits in court, it was worth something to just make the problems vanish.
Note that Google specifically has not agreed that there was any patent infringement:
Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2030241/google-licenses-video-codec-from-mpeg-la-to-bolster-vp8.html
P.S. I am somewhat bemused by your tone. It seems you are eager to see VP8 get shackled by patents... why is that? Are you so certain that Google is a bad actor here that you just want to see Google get punished? Or do you hate freedom, or what exactly?
Please for one moment stipulate that VP8 contains technologies that are just enough different from the patents that they don't infringe... would you still have a problem with VP8 in that case?
MPEG-LA has claimed that it is impossible to make a video codec without infringing patents, because all the fundamental technologies are patented... is this, in your opinion, a good situation?
I'm personally cheering for Google in all this. They spent over $100 million to buy On2, just so they could set VP8 free. As far as I can tell, they did this for two reasons:
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely