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That would be convenient, but Jobs did not say it was MPEG LA assembling a patent portfolio to go after the OGG family. OGG poses no credible threat to H.264 a
by jws 17y ago
That would be convenient, but Jobs did not say it was MPEG LA assembling a patent portfolio to go after the OGG family.
OGG poses no credible threat to H.264 and is not currently used by anyone with enough assets to make a lawsuit profitable. The business case for an OGG patent pool is to be in place when someone with deep pockets infringes.
I'd put my money on one of the patent holders that got solicited for a possible pool being an Apple friendly and tipping Apple off.
But back to the original article: Surely H.264 is a patent "mine field", but it is a mine field with a map. You buy your license and you are clear to go.
Absent from the article is any description of how the OGG developers performed some sort of systematic patent search by people knowledgeable in patent law and compared them against the various format specifications and current algorithms.
The developers not deliberately injecting patents isn't enough. You have to ensure you are not infringing all of them before you can use it if you are a target with deep pockets.
I'm against almost all patents, but the OGG response doesn't do anything to convince me that OGG is patent proof and the Apple/MPEG LA villainy talk is irrelevant.
- CUViper 17y agoWell, that minefield map for H.264 only shows what patent mines the MPEG LA has laid down. But when it comes to hidden patents, why assume that H.264 is any better than Theora?
- jws 17y agoThe biggest companies in the video encoding industry, the ones with vast expertise in video patents, have a significant financial interest in making sure that no one else has a patent claim on their cash cow. It's a lot like buying mob protection.
- nitrogen 17y agoBut it doesn't work -- look at how Microsoft got sued by Alcatel-Lucent after licensing MP3 from Fraunhofer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcatel-Lucent_v._Microsoft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcatel-Lucent_v._Microsoft
- jws 17y agoOh really? That wikipedia page says that Microsoft won on the MP3 related patents (on appeal), in part specifically because they had licensed MP3 technology from Fraunhofer's MP3 pool. (Getting your $1.5B damages dropped because you spent $16M on licenses is a terrific bargain too). The parts where Microsoft has lost are on user interface patents unrelated to MP3 coding.
- papachito 17y agoWell, Google Chrome and Mozilla ship with theora, isn't that "big pocket" enough?
- houseabsolute 17y agoMozilla isn't really that deep of a pocket considering the cost of a lawsuit and the likely winnings. If I were Google and were asked to license the patent pool, I'd just take out Theora support in the U.S..