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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[3]: Comment by Kroc |
| By kaiwai on 2011-02-13 04:42:02 |
|
> When you have scum like Apple on the top of the list, no wonder these fuckers think about nothing but suing everyone and their dog. Those damned lawyers sure know how to piss people off! I swear I will laugh my ass off the day WebM becomes the dominant codec for the Internet. Go Google Go! They're at the top of the list because it is in alphabetical order and not because of how much money they get out of it or how much evilness they gain from being part of said organisation. |
 - Score: 3 |
| RE[3]: Comment by Kroc |
| By kristoph on 2011-02-13 05:21:16 |
|
Why would that be funny in any way? No major company makes money from their H.264 patents. If webM were to become a dominant royalty free codec everyone would just switch and carry on with their life. I personally think this MPEG-LA action is all for the best. Either they find no tangible patents which will strengthen webM or they find some patents and that can be dealt with in some predictable manner so webM can be deployed without FUD. K |
| - Score: 3 |
| This is all for the best. |
| By kristoph on 2011-02-13 05:27:05 |
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This MPEG-LA action is all for the best. Either they don't find any patents or they find some and those can be addressed (either by disputing their validity or by establishing some royalty regime). Either way it will elimate the FUD that gets slung at webM. K |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: This is all for the best. |
| By lemur2 on 2011-02-13 07:18:38 |
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> This MPEG-LA action is all for the best. Either they don't find any patents or they find some and those can be addressed (either by disputing their validity or by establishing some royalty regime). Either way it will elimate the FUD that gets slung at webM. K Not at all. The great value in WebM is that no royalties apply. As long as no royalties apply, there will be vested interests desperately trying to convince everyone that royalties should apply ... said royalties somehow magically being due to them, who did not invent or write WebM. |
| - Score: 3 |
| RE[2]: M(umblety)Peg |
| By dnebdal on 2011-02-13 12:14:55 |
|
> 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. This, I think, is where you've crucially but subtly misunderstood something. I'm obviously not speaking for everyone, but I see signs that I'm at least not alone in my view: Closed-source products are not in themselves a problem, and if someone has written something obviously better, I might pay for it. That, however, doesn't in any way depend on software patents: Even if they were completely invalidated tomorrow, that would hardly turn openoffice into office 2010 overnight, or tuxracer into NFS:Shift. It's not patents on underlying ideas that gives them a competitive edge, it's the labour and (arguably) design vision. Another sort of separate thing is that many opensource apps steadily improve until they're good enough to compete with the for-profit alternatives - how many people pay for a C compiler today? It's a shame if you make a living providing those alternatives, but at the same time it's a benefit for the rest of the world, both directly (one less thing to pay for) and indirectly: It ought to drive those selling software to come up with steadily more compelling products to compete against the OSS "baseline". Besides, it works better for some types of software than others; the opensource process is better at technical tools than creative efforts, so there's a huge niche left open. Edited 2011-02-13 12:21 UTC |
| - Score: 4 |
| RE[3]: I agree, but |
| By imaginant on 2011-02-13 15:43:00 |
| I've made OSNews a daily read for many years, long before I registered. It is one of the few sites that provide reasonable and well-considered analysis and points of view. The comments are similar and rarely outside the bounds of decency. Whatever you want to call yourself, I, for one, appreciate this site above all other technical news sites. Your and all other OSNews contributers are greatly appreciated. If you are an idiot, I can only wish I could join such an esteemed group. But, as a technical lightweight, I will be content with just having a source that helps me made sense of what is happening in the tech world. AsÃ, usted tiene mi agradecimiento. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[3]: M(umblety)Peg |
| By atsureki on 2011-02-13 22:44:42 |
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> Closed-source products are not in themselves a problem, and if someone has written something obviously better, I might pay for it. That, however, doesn't in any way depend on software patents: Even if they were completely invalidated tomorrow, that would hardly turn openoffice into office 2010 overnight, or tuxracer into NFS:Shift. It's not patents on underlying ideas that gives them a competitive edge, it's the labour and (arguably) design vision. Thank you, that was a good counterpoint that I enjoyed reading. The quote from my parent post you were more or less addressing directly was one of my (many) attempts to vent some frustration at this site's apparent hatred of all things Apple. Readers here seem to despise propriety above all else, from the curated garden to the hardware exclusivity to patented gestures, despite the fact that none of those things unfairly inhibits competition from companies that decide to do it differently. Meanwhile ruthlessness, dishonesty, and monopolistic force from Microsoft get a pass just because they broadly license their platform onto cheap hardware, and bald-faced cloning by F/LOSS is celebrated because, hey, free beer (and it is definitely about the beer, not the speech, or there wouldn't be so many recent threads siding with Flash). So while you make a good point about competition without patents, I didn't see any new explanations for the rest of the biases I've observed. However, it should also be noted that your reasoning applies just as well against all patents, not just software. And indeed, knockoffs of mainstream tech force cutting-edge innovations and drive prices down across the market, so all that's good about the principle applies in the realm of physical inventions, but where we run into the biggest problem on both sides is where there is either a) a massive outlay of initial capital to design something relatively simple to reproduce and then undersell the inventor (think pharmaceuticals, which are not legally protected), or b) a brilliant invention from someone who's not well-established that can easily be stolen away by a big company with an engineering department, as happened when auto makers decided they didn't need to license the patent for intermittent windshield wipers but went ahead and installed them anyway. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[4]: M(umblety)Peg |
| By TheGZeus on 2011-02-14 00:33:11 |
|
No one lauds flash here, that I can see. I see people saying "well, people on XP can use a good browser, or use flash" when talking about HTML5 video. Or "flash as a fallback" for browsers that aren't HTML5 capable... etc. Same argument presented differently. The point is, no one really likes flash. What they like is 'no h264 in standards' because of patent lawsuit threats. So when people say "I want to serve h264! I hate <other standard/company/whatever&g t;!" the response is often "then use flash, because only two browsers support h264". I stated that idea 4 different ways, in hopes that one of them is understood. Here's a 5th: People don't like flash. People hate h264 html5 video. Some people like to flail about and sing the praises of anything they can do on their iFoo, and rail against anything that requires even a simple software installation. "Then use flash and shut up" is the only thing one can say in response. Present a stupid problem, get a stupid solution. Plain enough for you? Do I have flashplayer installed? Yeah. I'm on youtube a fair bit (vlogging, blah blah), and not everything is in webm yet, nor do I have a new enough xulrunner installed, and my browser isn't 100% working on 1.9.3 anyway. I hate flash, I hate that it's proprietary software, I hate the way it works, I hate that it's a program running inside a program, and that it steals focus and interacts poorly when the browser wants it at the same time. The 64-bit Linux version is awful. Maybe one of the open implementations will meet/surpass it at some point, but right now I just say "ugh" and let it eat my cpu cycles. |
| - Score: 4 |
| Some anti-FUD for MPEG LA and supporters to consider |
| By lemur2 on 2011-02-14 02:50:55 |
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On WebM again: freedom, quality, patents http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/o... This article is a very good read. It would seem that MPEG LA actually have no applicable non-expired patents against WebM in their own pool, hence this call to others. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[4]: M(umblety)Peg |
| By Soulbender on 2011-02-14 06:33:22 |
|
> Meanwhile ruthlessness, dishonesty, and monopolistic force from Microsoft get a pass just because they broadly license their platform onto cheap hardware, and bald-faced cloning by F/LOSS is celebrated because, hey, free beer (and it is definitely about the beer, not the speech, or there wouldn't be so many recent threads siding with Flash) I don't know what site you've been reading but it can't be this one. MS is not given a free pass, quite the contrary. If anything they're even more scalded than Apple. Also, what bald-faced OSS cloning supports Flash? That didnt even make sense. |
| - Score: 3 |
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