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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[2]: This is actually good |
| By vodoomoth on 2011-02-12 12:37:44 |
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> > 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. 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. Guys, what are you saying? Wouldn't the judges dismiss the whole case with that obvious strategy? |
 - Score: 2 |
| RE: I agree, but |
| By vodoomoth on 2011-02-12 12:39:20 |
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I understand you but I'm not sure I come here for "professional journalism" (no offense to the editors). Learning the language constructs, the contents of the news and especially the comments draw me here, not how good a journalist Thom is. Is Thom a journalist anyway? Rhetorical question; I don't care. Edited 2011-02-12 12:39 UTC |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[2]: I agree, but |
| By Thom_Holwerda on 2011-02-12 13:05:37 |
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I'm not. I'm an idiot. Those might sound the same, but the difference is that a journalist gets paid, idiots do not. |
| - Score: 4 |
| . |
| By Icaria on 2011-02-12 13:22:14 |
| Competing with free is one thing but it seems outright evil to try and hobble a free standard for your own personal gain - and not even that; if someone does look into their patent portfolio at the behest of MPEG-LA and finds something, there's no guarantee that MPEG-LA will see a dime of that. The headline should read '[Probable] Sore Loser Goes on Shooting Rampage'. |
| - Score: 5 |
| RE[2]: Comment by smitty |
| By lemur2 on 2011-02-12 13:59:18 |
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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? I think that there is a law that applies almost perfectly to what MPEG LA seem to be trying to do here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor... Google does have a number of perfectly legal business relationships with this set of companies and organisations: http://www.webmproject.org/about... Google's relationship with those companies is based on the WebM technology being offered perpetually to everyone worldwide, no charge, irrevocably and royalty free. It seems to be a slam dunk case that MPEG LA are trying to interfere with those relationships. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[3]: M(umblety)Peg |
| By silix on 2011-02-12 16:31:04 |
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> I know you're surprised, but I have to disagree on this one. I think the cat is already out of the bag, and the Internet (aka, Tubes) is responsible. Secrets are just too darn hard to keep, and the price of trying is not really worth it. your post is made invalid by being based on a wrong assumption... a patent is NOT made to keep a technology, a design/implementation detail or (in general) an "invention", secret - a patent is made and applied for, to make MONEY by binding those who need to reuse that same invention, and is DISCLOSED and PUBLISHED in order to do thus a patent in the exact contrary of a secret... |
| - Score: 4 |
| RE[3]: M(umblety)Peg |
| By atsureki on 2011-02-12 17:43:04 |
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> Scientific research is open source. It has worked very effectively for hundreds of years. So you would have all software development funded by public research grants just to keep it out of the hands of profit-driven enterprises? Science is better than open source. It's open collaboration, and like capitalism, it engenders competition. You publish your methods and findings for peer review, and then others get to build on your work. H.264 was built in the open by multiple collaborators pooling together their previous efforts to come up with the best possible methods. Meanwhile, VP8 was created behind closed doors by a single company, and only the finished product released both as binaries and now as source. That's more akin to having the Roman Catholic Church, and then Google Luther comes along and distributes a common language copy of the Bible. Obviously both specs ended up frozen, but you're right, scientific conventions produced the superior product here. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[2]: A Good Sign in a Way |
| By Lennie on 2011-02-12 17:44:14 |
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It is not only about what is supported now, it is also about what will be supported in the near future. If all manufacturers start shipping hardware which has support then things will soon change. I wonder what Google TV will (also) support. Also that doesn't mean it will be all DRM-free, even Spotify uses Ogg Vorbis but it is encrypted as I understand it. |
| - Score: 3 |
| RE[4]: M(umblety)Peg |
| By TheGZeus on 2011-02-12 17:49:53 |
| Someone's never looked into the open development process. |
| - Score: 3 |
| Patens in VP8 ? I know VP2 was ok |
| By Lennie on 2011-02-12 18:00:41 |
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EDIT: I made a mistake in the subject, should have been VP3 Have a look at the video it tells you the story about VP3 at http://videos.mozilla.org/serv/a... on this page: http://air.mozilla.com/open-vide... On2 is the company Google bought and what got them VP8 (which is the codec in WebM). On2 was also the company that create VP3, which they donated to Xiph who based Ogg Theora on VP3. Now on the patents, I think VP3 is just fine in theory. I don't know enough about VP8 to judge about that. But I do know patents in general suck and their are some really stupid patents which patent very general things like the if-statement in programming languages. But those patents don't mean anything in real life if the defending party has enough money to fight it in court. Edited 2011-02-12 18:14 UTC |
| - Score: 2 |
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