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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."
A free as in money alternative that is as good as H.264 baseline profile will take a lot of revenue away from the MPLA.
Why would it? If you are in the encode business, you have to support H.264, it's that simple. Anyone who produces content is going to have a tool to create H.264 content. So what is the purpose of VP8? None for the community as such. Remember, you and I do not pay for this unless we are content creators, and as a content creator, if you don't do H.264 or MPEG-2, both have license fees, then you are not creating content for anything but your own mastubatory needs.
So, VP8 is a codec for one player, and one player only, Google. They don't want to pay for encoding H.264 so they make a bad, cheap copy and try to convince the world that it is better off with that encoder in it. Reality is that it doesn't matter at all. VP8 is junk, and it is designed to have Google, and ONLY Google, pay less for content creation on YouTube and probably in the mobile space in the future. Nothing else. For everybody else it is irrelevant and will always be irrelevant.
This isn't Google trying to do no evil, this is Google wanting to free-load on the works of others.
there should be some process for giving patent holders a limited amount of time to come forward with their grievances so that we don't get so far into the process before we decide we have to drop the whole project because of an existing patent
I can see it now. Some mediocre Google engineers are looking through the H.264 spec and trying to copy it as best they can. They struggle with this for a few months and then they go "we didn't know there were patents, you should have brought your grievances to us earlier, we have now wasted a lot of time trying to copy your stuff (and not doing a good job at it on the way) - how could we know you had patents attached?".... "It's there, in that document on your desk. That document that describes the algorithm you are trying to copy". "Yeah, but we didn't read that part!!"
VP8 is a BAD copy of H.264. It has no upside for the consumer whatsoever. It doesn't make anyone more or less rich. Well, except Google that is. VP8 is created to save Google, and only Google money. It is doing so by literally stealing the works of others. Yeah. Do no evil my azz. Leeching of the works of others definitely comes in under the "do some bad shit" label.
Wow, so when Nokia is trying to prevent Google from just copying hard work done by Nokia, Nokia is bad? So theft is OK?
Nokia is not a patent troll in this case, and the only one who want to have the works of others for free is Google. They blatantly violated patents they knew were in place so that the, and only Google in fact, would not have to pay. This has no impact on other entities than Google. Thieves.