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...

Of course duplicates...

[rakaz]

Of course does the list contain duplicates. Patents are usually limited to specific jurisdictions. Patents granted by the US patent office are only valid in the US. That is why companies file the same patent in many jurisdictions. That does not make the list less intimidating, because for VP8 to be free they still need to be invalidated individually in many courts around the world. Just take a look at the recent case of Microsoft vs Motorola for how tricky this is. A US judge agrees with Microsoft, while a German judge agrees with Motorola.

Re:Of course duplicates...

[Xest]

The point is, that if the patents all only cover one or two things, then you only need to do one or two things to get around the patents. It also means that there's only one or two things to try and invalidate, be it through prior art, obviousness or whatever.

That's a much easier task than working around or fighting 89 or whatever distinct patents. Stating there are 89 patents overstates the relevance of them for no other reason than fear mongering because there aren't 89 or whatever different patents per se, just one or two different patents, filed in 30 odd jurisdictions or whatever the actual numbers are.

You don't say?

[h4rr4r]

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

Florian Mueller

[Anonymous Coward]

At least when I see that name, I can ignore the quotes and comments as being nothing more than a paid shill spouting BS.

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.

Pff, patents

[progician]

This is so boring, really. I really consider today's tech industry just a huge pile of fraudulent investor. All these patents fights are over a software algorithm shows that there's no real innovation here: just plain old incremental releases that are developed and researched completely different entities (after a certain size, R&D division is like almost a different company) have nothing patentable on them, not in the original intention behind the whole idea of patents. This whole patent-wars are completely wasteful and useless, but the corporate lobby prevent any attempt of legislation that aim to eliminate corporate patents over trivial matters, so we stuck with these companies spending millions of dollars on lawyers and patent fights, for whose benefit? Lawyer benefit.

There has to be a point where it becomes so unbearable the whole idea of patents must be abolished and any company who participated in this fight must be also dismantled and assets to be redistributed.

Nokia research spending

[sjbe]

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.

Re:Is VP8 still relavant?

[jabuzz]

In a few months time (aka this year) outside of the USA MP3 is going to be patent free. Even in the USA in a couple of years decoding will be patent free. MP3 is going to be around for a very very long time because there is a huge amount of material encoded in it, so it has momentum and the patents are expiring rapidly.

Nokia is dead to me

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.