Slashdot Mirror
Free Software Camps Wading Into VP8 Patent Fight
An anonymous reader writes "As reported by Slashdot, Nokia recently notified the IETF that its RFC 6386 video codec (aka VP8, released by Google under a BSD license with a waiver of that company's patent rights) infringed several dozen of its patents; furthermore, Nokia was not inclined to license them under FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminating) terms. While the list provided by Nokia looks intimidating, Pamela Jones at Groklaw discovered that many appeared to be duplicates except for the country of filing; and even within a single country (e.g. the U.S.), some appeared to be overlapping. In other words, there may be far fewer distinct patented issues than what appears on Nokia's IETF form. Thom Holwerda at OSNews also weighed in, recalling another case where sweeping patent claims by Qualcomm and Huawei against the Opus open source audio codec proved to be groundless FUD. The familiar name Florian Mueller pops up again in Holwerda's article."
At least when I see that name, I can ignore the quotes and comments as being nothing more than a paid shill spouting BS.
Over the last few decades, Nokia has spent more money in R&D than almost any other company in the world.
They do spend quite a lot but they're not top of the heap even just in technology companies. IBM, and Microsoft both spend considerably more on research.
Nokia has spent roughly $4-5 billion per year but it's been dropping steadily from about $5B in 2009 down to about $3.7B last year. A very substantial sum to be sure but not out of line with other large tech companies and they've been forced to spend steadily less due to their financial position. Kind of amazing that they can't seem to develop a hit phone when they spend 5X what Apple does on R&D. Makes you wonder what the heck they are doing.
VP8 Hardware codecs are up to generation six, freely licensed also - to 80 chip companies so far, and in production by many major vendors. So there's that.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Sigh.
If you sell individual videos more than 12 minutes long, you play MPEG-LA a royalty of of 2% or $0.02 per sale, whichever is less.
If you run a paid subscription service, and you have more than 100,000 subscribers, you pay MPEG-LA a royalty between $0.10 and $0.25 per subscriber per year.
If you broadcast your shows on TV, you pay either a one time fee of $2500 for each encoder, or between $0.005 and $0.01 per viewer per year.
If you make your videos available for free (even if they are ad supported) you pay no royalty.
If you sell videos less than 12 minutes long you pay no royalty.
If you run a subscription service with less than 100,000 subscribers you pay no royalty.
If that "prevents you from becoming a producer", you might want to rethink your business model.
(Source: the AVC/H.264 terms.)
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
And I say that as a booster who was happy with an n810 and the Qt work just a few years ago. Sorry about that cancer you got, Nokia (or was it MS?), but it's changed you and it's fatal.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)