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."

Comments

Thanks Microsoft!

[ozmanjusri]

Thanks for the nostalgia and for reviving SCO in the guise of Nokia. It was nice of you to dig out Florian for a reprise too...

You don't say?

[h4rr4r]

So when it comes time for MS to dish out more FUD Florian shows up? What a fucking surprise.

Re:Is VP8 still relavant?

[h4rr4r]

They still charge for the encoder.
Because VP8 is good enough and FREE, is why the big hassle is there. Giving up some performance to get out from under the MPEG-LA's thumb is well worth it.

It's about locking out or controlling production

[SIGBUS]

They still have their palms out if you want to encode video for public consumption. It isn't about screwing the consumer so much as preventing the consumer from becoming a producer.