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Free Software Camps Wading Into VP8 Patent Fight

Posted by timothy on from the spearguns-would-be-good dept.

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."

6 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. Thanks Microsoft! by ozmanjusri · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...

    --
    "I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
  2. Of course duplicates... by rakaz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. You don't say? by h4rr4r · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  4. Florian Mueller by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  5. It's about locking out or controlling production by SIGBUS · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
  6. Pff, patents by progician · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.