Free Software Camps Wading Into VP8 Patent Fight 113
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."
Of course duplicates... (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.
Re:Of course duplicates... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Of course duplicates... (Score:4, Interesting)
Pff, patents (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.
Re:Is VP8 still relavant? (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, GPUs tend not to be as fixed-function as they used to be. Some of the nastier mobile parts are still pretty inflexible; but Nvidia has certainly been pushing the nearly-general-purpose compute capabilities of their PC line down into their Tegra products, and they probably won't be the only one.
There are certainly a lot of existing and near future parts that are fixed function and will never support anything else; but if the pressure remains, newer fixed function devices might support it, and programmable devices will always be a firmware update away from doing so.
Re:Is VP8 still relavant? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.