4 ms·

You can't write an open letter and expect patent owners to tell you if you're infringing or not. The accepted thing is to conduct patent searches (money and law

You can't write an open letter and expect patent owners to tell you if you're infringing or not. The accepted thing is to conduct patent searches (money and lawyers), and make sure that your product does not run afoul of something that's already in there. I'm not saying that this system is ideal, (It is not! Let's make something better to replace the patent system - something based on private contract alone) but Theora is not necessarily legally OK (under the existing patent regime) just because some guy wrote a few open letters and posted them to a website. What would I do? I would go with whatever is the better technology. (And from what I've read, Theora is a terrible format.)

akeefer 17y ago
Making sure that some piece of software doesn't run afoul of an existing patent is basically impossible no matter how many billable lawyer hours you throw at the problem. You'll either come to the conclusion that everything has already been patented and thus you can never build anything ever again, if you read patents broadly, or you won't find anything at all, if you read them more narrowly and throw out the ones that obviously have prior art and should never have been granted. The only 100% reliable method of patent lawsuit control is software development abstinence . . .
ZeroGravitas 17y ago
Xiph and Mozilla have both done patent searches. The lawyers that they spent the money on told them that publicizing the results would reduce their options if they were ever sued so the only evidence they haven't found problems is that they haven't altered Theora to work around problems and that they ship it in their product, respectively. I would assume Google (and Opera and a bunch of other companies with slightly less impressive amounts of cash and lawyers) have done the same, though I don't think they've mentioned it if they have.

akeefer 17y ago

Making sure that some piece of software doesn't run afoul of an existing patent is basically impossible no matter how many billable lawyer hours you throw at the problem. You'll either come to the conclusion that everything has already been patented and thus you can never build anything ever again, if you read patents broadly, or you won't find anything at all, if you read them more narrowly and throw out the ones that obviously have prior art and should never have been granted. The only 100% reliable method of patent lawsuit control is software development abstinence . . .

ZeroGravitas 17y ago

Xiph and Mozilla have both done patent searches. The lawyers that they spent the money on told them that publicizing the results would reduce their options if they were ever sued so the only evidence they haven't found problems is that they haven't altered Theora to work around problems and that they ship it in their product, respectively. I would assume Google (and Opera and a bunch of other companies with slightly less impressive amounts of cash and lawyers) have done the same, though I don't think they've mentioned it if they have.