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| By Thom Holwerda, submitted by aa on 2011-02-11 16:00:00 |
| Well, well, well. The MPEG-LA is showing its true colours. After a decade of threatening to patent troll the living heck out of Theora, the company led by a patent troll has now finally put its money where its mouth is. Well, sort of. They don't actually have any patents yet, they're asking people to submit patents they believe are essential to the VP8 specification. Update: MPEG (so not the MPEG-LA) has announced its intent to develop a new video compression standard for the web which will be royalty-free. "The new standard is intended to achieve substantially better compression performance than that offered by MPEG-2 and possibly comparable to that offered by the AVC Baseline Profile. MPEG will issue a call for proposals on video compression technology at the end of its upcoming meeting in March 2011 that is expected to lead to a standard falling under ISO/IEC 'Type-1 licensing', i.e. intended to be 'royalty free'." |
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| RE: This is actually good |
| By elsewhere on 2011-02-12 04:39:48 |
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> This will be a great test for WebM. If MPEG-LA fails, it will be proven to be patent-free, even if they succeed, we'll know about the problems before head. If would be much worse, if there were a submarine patent that's unearthed 5 years in the future, when everybody has already switched to WebM. That would be much like the GIF/MP3 disasters. MPEG-LA isn't an authority though. They simply license the patents that are made available to them. It's entirely possible that a submarine patent is lying somewhere in wait for H.264. Unlikely, but MPEG-LA can't guarantee there isn't. If you want to submarine webm, it wouldn't make sense to show your cards now, it could kill it before it takes off. Better to wait until it becomes more widespread. |
 - Score: 3 |
| RE: M(umblety)Peg |
| By atsureki on 2011-02-12 06:14:45 |
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> Eventually, the whole software patent system is going to come crumbling down. This might be the one to push it over the top. We have foisted on the rest of the world one naked greed maintenance system. Assuming there is even a shred of decency left anywhere, the whole insane thing will be chucked over the side. "The times they are a-changing". It's time for the "content corps" to adapt or move out of the way. Remember where software patents started. Apple licensed research tech from PARC and did real R&D work to turn it into a desirable, practical product. Microsoft partnered with them to deliver Office for Mac, gained intimate knowledge of the system, and ultimately used it to steal their business with a clone. Apple sued for copyright of "Look and Feel", which backfired by setting the precedent that you can't do that. Obviously there are disagreements about who all was and wasn't in the right in that story, but regardless, the entire industry watched Apple learn a lesson about how easy it is for development work to be taken and used against you. From then on, software firms have been patenting every idea they come across as a deterrent to this kind of backstabbing and undermining. It never goes to trial because companies are afraid of exactly what OSNews readers keep cheering for - another Look and Feel precedent that will destroy the software patent system as well. Patents, copyrights, and everything else that falls under the IP umbrella intentionally slow further innovation of new ideas. The tradeoff is that individuals and companies that make massive investments in creating new art or tech have a window of opportunity to reap all the profits their creation generates, thus making the outlay worthwhile. If the MAD theory behind software patents fizzles out into nothing, so does all the potential monetary value of platform development. This site's hivemind believes that all software should be free beer, that no one should be allowed to make a profit by selling a desirable product they own the rights to; but as someone who appreciates the finer points of Apple's work, I'm not so sure I'm willing to give up capitalism entirely. Now that I've finished ruminating on so much nothing, there's an important point to be made about different kinds of patents. There are "obvious" patents as in so obvious and well-established that no one can ever call it their "invention", along the lines of "pressing a physical button to send a command to the system". Those are struck down, guaranteed. Then there are the "obvious" patents people here often conflate with the former group - i.e. obvious in retrospect, or "I see what you did there", functionality that can not be concealed in application. This would be stuff like a window in a desktop metaphor. You may ask with righteous indignation how you can patent something with no alternative, but really, do Android and iOS use windows? Are WebOS "cards" Macintosh-style windows? Alternative multitasking interfaces are finally starting to come along. I don't believe Apple should have run unopposed for 26 years, but what if their early competitors had been forced to come up with a different model, rather than a hasty copy with misconfigured keyboard shortcuts? The final kind of software patent, and the one most relevant here, is real, non-obvious invention. These are the special algorithms and techniques that power state-of-the-art media codecs, compression algorithms, threading algorithms, and encryption. It is only because patents exist that these kinds of things can be licensed at all. x264 and LAME exist because h.264 and mp3 are open, patented standards that anyone can access and, for a price, provide implementations of. The aforementioned simply skip out on the bill by conveniently existing outside the legal sphere of the patents. The only alternative commercial development model is trade secret, which makes it extremely difficult to license out safely and impossible to sue imitators implementing the same methods. Now, it needs to be said that this is not what Xiph and Google are. Vorbis, Theora, and VP8 are not trying to be sneaky; they're not trying to steal MPEG-LA patented methods to undermine their rightful owners, and therein lies the only valid good vs. evil painting of this whole affair. When a patent owner attacks unprovoked, that's evil, and that seems to be the direction this is headed. But to say that the ability to patent software in general is evil is to take a hard-line stance against capitalism itself. In the post-Internet world, copyrights and patents simply last too long. Yearly and even quarterly tech profits frequently exceed affluent nations' GDPs, but the concept behind the system is solid. It protects the little guys, like those that Google keeps buying, as well as the big guys like Apple who keep their eyes on their own work, from immediate co-opting by big guys with a long history of NIH and me-too-ism like Microsoft. The patent system needs renovation, not demolition. OT: Incidentally, RD recently made the point that Google was an early platform development partner on the iPhone, and has since turned around and released a broadly licensed clone to compete with its former host. The Android-Windows comparisons grow ever more poignant. Apple has patents they could use use to take action, but the lesson they learned in Look and Feel was twofold -- One, copyright is useless. Two, legal action is risky, and could end up legitimizing the imitator. Moreover, the Halloween documents and the whole SCO Group debacle have shown the industry that FUD backfires as well, so as long as the iPhone continues to lead in profits and customer satisfaction, Apple's only good choice is to ignore the imitators, no matter how sleazy. |
| - Score: 2 |
| WTF |
| By Tuishimi on 2011-02-12 06:23:03 |
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I know this comment does not contribute much, but my response to this is just that... WTF?! I don't swear much, but the word "*ssh*les" also came to mind. Man oh man. I'm going to go watch Fringe. |
| - Score: 2 |
| Comment by smitty |
| By smitty on 2011-02-12 06:50:07 |
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So this basically means that they don't currently have any patents, right? They're basically asking everyone out there to see if anyone else does. We'll see what happens. Best case scenario is that they can't find anything, and VP8 gets considered a lot safer. That would probably be enough for MS to include the codec into Windows/IE9. As well as give Apple a face-saving opportunity if they wish to stand down from their stance. Worst case, I guess we all find out that VP8 is heavily patented, but at least we all find out now and not 5 years from now when everything depends on it. MPEG-LA is clearly seeing that VP8 is about to take off, this is their only chance to stop it. |
| - Score: 5 |
| RE[2]: M(umblety)Peg |
| By unclefester on 2011-02-12 06:58:34 |
| Scientific research is open source. It has worked very effectively for hundreds of years. |
| - Score: 7 |
| RE: A Good Sign in a Way |
| By westlake on 2011-02-12 07:07:20 |
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> If they do nothing then VP8 will end up encroaching outwards from the web and the whole h.264 house of cards will start falling. Get a grip. H.264 is a broadcast, cable and sattelite distribution standard. Freeview in the U.K. DirecTV and the Dish Network in the states. The ATSC tuner in your North American HD set or media PC can decode H.264. H.264 is a home video standard. The pocket HD camcorder. The Blu-Ray video. The odds that all the HD video hardware you own was built by an H.264 licensor are probably no worse than 3 in 5. H.264 is a CCTV video standard. Video conferencing. Video security. Medical, industrial and military applications. H.264 is Flash, Silverlight and Neflix. 20% of peak hour download traffic in the states was a Netflix stream before Netflix offered a streaming only service. The content protected H.264 video "app" like Netflix is only a firmware upgrade away from integration into your "Internet-enabled" HDTV, video game console or set top box. The "app" doesn't need a browser. It doesn't need to be buzzword-compliant. It's the "app" that is encroaching on the geek's open web - not the other way around. The content provider makes these decisions. The hardware manufactuer. Mitsubishi. Panasonic. Samsung. Vizio. |
| - Score: 5 |
| RE[2]: Comment by Kroc |
| By Kroc on 2011-02-12 08:46:23 |
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The MPEG-LAs licencing is set up so that they could cherry pick just about any individual or organisation and sue them. They are no better than the RIAA who want to extract money every time a song gets played. At the moment they don’t need to go about litigating, despite a massive number of individuals and organisations not correctly paying their H.264 fees, they are earning enough steady income from television transmissions, cameras / camcorders / DVD & Blu-Ray players and the content industry; it would be expensive and messy to start suing people to try extract a small percentage more. But everything is moving to the web. It won’t be long before every TV is Internet connected and video capable. And if those TVs support royalty-free WebM—which gives a price advantage to equipment manufacturers—then in 10 years time, the MPEG-LA could see their sweet little taxation on the populous completely dry up. WebM is the biggest threat that faces them, and they will not go quietly. This is an organisation whose CEO trolls his own customers with patent litigation. Expect litigation against VP8 decoder manufacturers or service broadcasters. It is their only response when things get desperate. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: Comment by smitty |
| By pgeorgi on 2011-02-12 08:55:39 |
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> MPEG-LA is clearly seeing that VP8 is about to take off, this is their only chance to stop it. I doubt their interest is in stopping VP8. They merely want to get their share |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE[2]: Comment by smitty |
| By lemur2 on 2011-02-12 11:49:51 |
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> > MPEG-LA is clearly seeing that VP8 is about to take off, this is their only chance to stop it. I doubt their interest is in stopping VP8. They merely want to get their share They don't have a share of WebM. I'm not saying they don't want to take a share, I'm saying only that they don't have one. |
| - Score: 3 |
| RE: Comment by smitty |
| By vodoomoth on 2011-02-12 12:37:13 |
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> So this basically means that they don't currently have any patents, right? They're basically asking everyone out there to see if anyone else does. Yes. Which makes me wonder how this will play out in a court of law before the judge (and jury if applicable in this kind of cases). I know that if I were a member of that jury, knowing of this "call for patents in order to sue" would be enough for me to disregard the complaints even if they would have otherwise been perfectly legitimate. But I also know the judiciary system doesn't allow that kind of superficial assessment or reaction from a juror... does it? |
| - Score: 3 |
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