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Vectis IP Announces Call for Patents Essential to the Opus codec

206 points by teilo 4y ago

teilo 4y ago
It looks like Fraunhoffer and Dolby are going after hardware devices using the Opus codec. 'The planned Opus program will focus on hardware devices and will not be directed towards open-source software, applications, services, or content. '“We are pleased to act as administrator in the development of this important patent pool which aims to support efficient, fair, and transparent access to hundreds of patents covering technologies used in the Opus codec,” said Giustino de Sanctis, CEO of Vectis IP. “The reasonable royalty rates of this pool will balance the interests of both the program’s innovators and end-user device manufacturers whose products benefit from use of these patented technologies.” 'Vectis IP expects to launch the program in the coming months and for the program to include access to hundreds of patents with a royalty rate in the range of €15-20c per unit. Royalties for willing licensees will be applicable from the program launch, with further incentives available for licensees that promptly execute a pool license. 'Vectis IP welcomes other innovators with patents essential to Opus to submit applications for consideration in the program at opus@vectis.com.' In other words: Yeah, we know that the IETF put out an IPR on Opus years ago. We don't care. We smell money.
- chrismorgan 4y ago
  > we know that the IETF put out an IPR on Opus years ago As in, over a decade ago. (Though they are covering more recent work in their patent pool, explicitly including stuff that they declare the planned program will not be directed toward.)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Conan_Kudo 4y ago
  Holy shit, €15 a unit? That's insane!
  - zamadatix 4y ago
    I think it’s a botched formatting attempt to say 15-20 Euro cents not 15 euros to 20 cents
    - Conan_Kudo 4y ago
      Oh, that makes way more sense. 15c is still high, but not insane.
teilo 4y ago
More information: https://www.opuspool.com/ https://www.opuspool.com/
- yarg 4y ago
  Is there any more information from someone who isn't them?
  - teilo 4y ago
    Nothing but blurbs on IP news websites that add nothing.
rektide 4y ago
Vultures coming to take claims to a codec which, I understand, was fairly carefully built to be actually open. That it is only persecuting hardware inplementations gives me little relief. Low power hardware blocks should be readily available & usable, be a great help to making computers & sound devices better, with low power consumption. This is, as much as anything, a huge blow against making bluetooth generally good & better; a great potential general use codec, encumbered! Alas! Make sure we cant use anything but locked-in overpriced proprietary codecs. Keep standards from actually developing healthily, fighting a 10+ year old codec from growing. Everyone associated with this patent pool should be blocked from the OIN patent pool immediately & with malice. Alas OIN is too old to have defenses against these here new crust of aggro lawyering stasists.
- markvdb 4y ago
  Hyenas, not vultures. Vultures don't hunt themselves.
  - jvickers 4y ago
    What do you mean? Hyenas hunt hyenas? Hyenas hunt?
    - markvdb 4y ago
      Vultures are mainly carrion-eaters, scavengers. Hyenas mainly hunt actively, often in coordinated groups, and not just for the weakest animals. Opus being a healthy codec, and the attempt at a coordinated attack make the hyena analogy seems more appropriate, to me at least.
- Taniwha 4y ago
  What's even is a "hardware implementation"? does it include a PC consumer box the software?
teilo 4y ago
This is probably behind Oracle's move to remove Opus from Virtualbox recordings and revert to Vorbis, as of v.7. There are a LOT of commercial apps using Opus. Like Skype. The fact that they are only going after hardware at present will brings Apple into the mix, because iOS devices support Opus. This should be interesting.
- rockdoe 4y ago
  There are a LOT of commercial apps using Opus. Like Skype. It's more like - Opus' voice part IS Skype. Skype contributed all their patents, technologies and key engineers to the development of Opus.
- mappu 4y ago
  There are known patents on Opus held by Xiph.org, Broadcom and Microsoft, all made freely available. But as per https://opus-codec.org/license/ https://opus-codec.org/license/ if you try patent litigation against anyone, your license to use any of these free patents is revoked. So there's not many ways this pool can work. A company can only join it if they want to give up on ever using Opus themselves. It's a really crazy move from Dolby since they have at least a few products that use Opus ( https://professional.dolby.com/product/dolby-voice/dolby-voice-room/ https://professional.dolby.com/product/dolby-voice/dolby-voi... , https://docs.dolby.io/communications-apis/docs/guides-dolby-voice https://docs.dolby.io/communications-apis/docs/guides-dolby-... , likely more)
  - bscphil 4y ago
    > It's a really crazy move from Dolby since they have at least a few products that use Opus Seems like the strategy here is going to be to use FUD to leech small amounts of money from individual hardware device sales from the companies that can afford to pay it. It's just rent seeking. So long as they never actually sue anyone for their use of Opus, it seems like they'll be in the clear as far as the Opus license goes.
    - nerdponx 4y ago
      Sounds almost more like extortion. Edit: wouldn't it be pretty easy to call this bluff? you don't even have to try to win the court case, you just have to get them to sue you and immediately lose their license, or to admit that they can't sue you because they don't want to lose their own license, and the whole thing falls apart.
yarg 4y ago
There will never be an end to this bullshit. If the patent system sought to promote innovation, rather than stiffle it, we'd stop using "first to file" and move to "all to independently derive". Yes, independent derivation may still end up in court - but there's at least reasonable standards of evidence either way.
- gorgoiler 4y ago
  Are you saying that anyone who independently derived the mechanism — before the first machine was made public or the patent diagrams were published — should also be granted the patent? Once your rival has manufactured and sold their sausage making machine you can take it apart to see how it works. Perhaps you just claim you’ve never done this?
  - CogitoCogito 4y ago
    > Are you saying that anyone who independently derived the mechanism — before the first machine was made public or the patent diagrams were published — should also be granted the patent? You seem incredulous that a "first to invent" system could work, but US moved away from that system less than a decade ago. Edit: Never mind the first post was about independent derivations. That's not the same thing. My mistake.
  - yarg 4y ago
    Do I need to quote myself? I said things will still end up in court - and the end-product in the example that you're giving will be too similar to the patented invention to stand up in court.
- MereInterest 4y ago
  Even better, "none to independently derive". Patents must be non-obvious. I would take independent invention as evidence that the patent should never have been granted in the first place.
  - yarg 4y ago
    They must be non-obvious to an expert in the field. In theory that's a strictly tighter constraint than non-obvious, although it's impossible to actually implement. However, independent invention isn't necessarily a proof that the particular patent should not have been granted. Often, it is not the solution but its problem space that's obvious. There tends to be a finite domain of reasonable solutions, and solutions converge to that domain. In which case you probably want some sort of thicket busting legislation.
croes 4y ago
*Fraunhofer
Test0129 4y ago
On one hand I believe the theoretical patent is very important to promote innovation. If you, the inventor, can get guarantees on your sales for 10 years (which is reasonable, imo) then it'll encourage people to make more stuff. I don't think patents are wrong. However, the way patents are filed is wrong. There's so many issues with first to file. It's a good system when your office sees 100 patents a year. All of them are likely to be novel, and likely to be made by independent inventors. The problem we have now is there are entire companies (IBM, Google, RAND, TI, etc) that exist solely to farm patents. In fact, there are so many patent farms disguised as businesses I challenge you to sit, think of something, and search for a patent for it. I guarantee you one exists. Moreover, pursue the patent office if you never have. The definition of invention, especially in tech, is so vague it may as well not exist. Vomit some smart sounding stuff on paper with drawings and you've got yourself a patent that, if written correctly, will almost certainly produce a profit. Hell, take a cat and draw a stereo speaker on top of it. Call it "animal sound machine". I guarantee you if it hasn't already been done someone will do it. Better, draw a cat with a USB stick duct taped to it and call it "IP over Feline". Devise a stupid protocol. Then sue every idiot who thought it'd be funny to make one. This is seriously how lame modern patent law is. You might even be infringing on a patent with IP over Feline because someone already "invented" transportable storage. I don't have a solution to the problem. Part of me wants to say one patent, per inventor, per term (10 years). You have the option of canceling a patent to put a new one in. But this seems like it's too strong. Maybe there's another way that legitimate inventors for an appropriate amount of time, and also disincentivizes patent trolls through some measure. Maybe we could start with "common good" patents (as determined by a board of smart people) being invalidated.
- alexforster 4y ago
  > In fact, there are so many patent farms disguised as businesses I challenge you to sit, think of something, and search for a patent for it. Nice try, Opposing Counsel.
  - dontlaugh 4y ago
    Heh. Don't read patents.
choeger 4y ago
After so many years that idea should be laughed at at court. Patents are one thing but waiting for your "free" codec to gain usage across the world only then to reap the benefits should be called fraud.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  It’s also just a sign of how broken the system is. These companies didn’t contribute anything to the creation of opus. The codec would have still existed since it was designed explicitly to avoid existing patents.
- jpalomaki 4y ago
  I've understood the trademark system works so that you need to constantly defend your trademarks to keep them valid. Maybe something similar should be applied to patents.
- gruez 4y ago
  Unfortunately I don't know of any legal theory that would actually cause a judge to rule this as fraud. Unlike trademarks for instance, there's no requirement for you to actively defend a patent to have it be valid.
  - mindslight 4y ago
    Estoppel. The development process was highly publicized and the relevant entities surely knew about the call for patent claims. And possibly laches. Patents are highly dependent on the technological context of when they're written. The Opus development process deliberately sought to avoid existing patents, and trying to reverse these judgements a decade later is disingenuous.
mngnt 4y ago
Okay, maybe I'm missing something here, but how? Per wikipedia (1), opus is licenesed under bsd license. More relevant, on their own site(2) they tout opus as "a totally open, royalty-free" codec. My question is, how can someone just step in, say "this mine, give money" and the world just goes with it? Did the opus developers (inadvertendly) use some patented tech? Do hardware makers use it? Or do Dolby and Fraunhofer have patents so broad that they cover anything encoding audio? (1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_(audio_format) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_(audio_format) (2) https://opus-codec.org/ https://opus-codec.org/
- masklinn 4y ago
  > Did the opus developers (inadvertendly) use some patented tech? That’s certainly the claim since it’s a patent pool. > Do hardware makers use it? If it’s a fundamental building block of opus then necessarily, no?
  - GoblinSlayer 4y ago
    Hardware codecs are just generic applications of VHDL and integrated circuits. Making integrated circuits work is a legitimate challenge, but that's an integrated circuits patent, not a codec patent.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > My question is, how can someone just step in, say "this mine, give money" and the world just goes with it? It's called violence. Might is right [1] means the world goes along out of fear, not agreement. Violence need not appear physical, but is always backed up by physical violence in the end. There's no irony that so-called "intellectual property" is backed up by thugs with guns. Whatever noble aims patents began with they are now nothing more than a form of violent "political language" against the intellectual classes, designed, as Orwell said, to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Might_Is_Right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Might_Is_Right [2] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
ggm 4y ago
I'd love to see a well written defence of their position. Frauenhoffer and Dolby both employ smart people. If they put smarts out into the world, which people leveraged to do smart++ then there's a component of "ok, so pay the tax" on this but given the IETF side, even with IETF IPR statements, this sounds like they misunderstood the RAND goal. or is EUR 20c per unit for hardware 'reasonable' -on Apple volumes, thats a lot of money.
- ksec 4y ago
  >or is EUR 20c per unit for hardware 'reasonable' -on Apple volumes, thats a lot of money. Apple thought they should only paid $1.5 / unit to Qualcomm for all of Qualcomm's patents. 20c per unit is a lot for single type of patents with limited coverage. Their "reasonable" range is probably 1c per unit. Which is still about $3M / year.
- hamandcheese 4y ago
  Compared to Apple's profits, it's not much.
  - jamiek88 4y ago
    Apple defends margin like a goose defends its goslings. They won’t see it that way.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  It’s not a hardware feature and it’s not essential to Apple’s business. If the trolls insist that it is, Apple can and should nuke the extremely limited software support they have for it.
girvo 4y ago
As a secondary point to this, is AV1 also at risk of this kind of rent-seeking behaviour? It's also claimed to be patent-and-royalty-free, as does Opus. These companies who step on tech innovation to collect their pound of flesh are disgusting to me.
- gardaani 4y ago
  Yes, of course. Sisvel is already selling a license for their AV1 patent pool: https://www.sisvel.com/licensing-programs/audio-and-video-coding-decoding/video-coding-platform/license-terms/av1-license-terms https://www.sisvel.com/licensing-programs/audio-and-video-co... AOMedia fights against this with its defense program: "Established the AOMedia patent defense program to help protect AV1 ecosystem participants in the event of patent claims" https://aomedia.org/press%20releases/the-alliance-for-open-media-statement/ https://aomedia.org/press%20releases/the-alliance-for-open-m...
  - arlcode 4y ago
    Do we know how successful their claim is. I've not followed that too much. It makes sense to go after hardware vebdors, because that is where the money is and shaking down open source software users is a lot of work and bad press.
    - tadfisher 4y ago
      I've yet to hear of them suing Intel, who recently shipped hardware AV1 encoding in their GPUs. So either Intel is paying up or the pool doesn't want to poke the bear.
walterbell 4y ago
Isn't Opus used by WebRTC, i.e. this would break the many video conferencing systems which have made WFH and online conferences possible for the last couple of years? That's a rather large class of customers to troll.
- corndoge 4y ago
  No, which is explained in TFA
  - walterbell 4y ago
    Because of the 'hardware' clause? What stops them from expanding the scope later? Why would any business want to use a codec associated with patent trolls? Are there other IETF protocols subject to retroactive patents?
    - chrismorgan 4y ago
      > What stops them from expanding the scope later? Especially given that they explicitly include software in the patent pool subject matter! From https://www.opuspool.com/ https://www.opuspool.com/: > The Opus pool license covers the specifications […], and the official software releases of the Opus audio codec, […]
    - girvo 4y ago
      > What stops them from expanding the scope later Absolutely nothing, because their own patent pool docs state that software is fair game. It's gross beyond belief.
errantmind 4y ago
Software patents, and patents in general, are a plague on the industry and should be abolished due to a lack of empirical evidence to justify their existence. As a thought experiment they make sense, but thought experiments often diverge from reality. The Case Against Patents: https://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/more/2012-035 https://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/more/2012-035
- CorrectHorseBat 4y ago
  Seems like they are going after hardware implementations, not software (not that that's much better).
  - chrismorgan 4y ago
    So they claim. But they’re also explicitly including software in the scope of the pool itself.
  - russdill 4y ago
    That's can be a super hard line to draw as many hardware implementations are just firmware running on hardware with some specialized dsp instructions.
  - Namidairo 4y ago
    I wonder if this could stifle (hardware) use of the RFC Opus over A2DP vendor codec that was slowly coming together on Pipewire. (Which is kind of in the chicken-egg position where there's no hardware to receive it outside of other pipewire clients anyway.) Edit: It's already merged and ready for use, and is the only thing that'll do multi-channel audio over bluetooth?
    - nyanpasu64 4y ago
      I'm hoping to add support for Opus to the upcoming PineBuds Pro, but no guarantees I'll be able to accomplish it at my current skill level. So far I couldn't even get the first SDK to compile (https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineBuds_Pro https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineBuds_Pro).
vintermann 4y ago
Maybe we can argue that since there's a war going on and all that, we can no longer tolerate this sort of leeching. Attack it as unpatriotic. I mean, it is. It's the least way it's disgusting, but it's still perfectly true.
Aachen 4y ago
Opus is a decade old, any patents would have to be filed before then or Opus would be prior work, and they're issued only for 20 years, right? At least for the software, which they claim not to be going after (but who'd trust a software patent lawyer). Any software implementations such as in VirtualBox, who just switched back to Vorbis from Opus, would be perfectly safe in at most ten years, perhaps already today. Am I understanding this right, at least for the software part?
- nullc 4y ago
  Most of Opus is quite a bit older than that too a decade is for the final standard but the project began in earnest in 2007 and many components came from earlier work.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
It's best understood through the lens of FUD against both a specific competitor codec and a competing standards methodology. Fraunhofer and Dolby make money from patent royalties on standards. If standards no longer want patents or royalties, then they are out of business. It's obviously going that way long term, but in the meantime a bit of "Linux is cancer/communism" type FUD will more than pay for itself in extending their patent royalty collecting time.
- rockdoe 4y ago
  This is the correct way to understand it. Dolby sells a bunch of codecs, and Fraunhofer sells USAC (which is basically Opus with some patented stuff added on). Their problem is that Opus serves many of those use cases for free. They can't allow that to happen, so scaring potential customers away is good for business.
crest 4y ago
sylware 4y ago
long time we have not seen a patent troll taking on major open source components. proxy from companies of mpeg?
- rockdoe 4y ago
  They're literally saying Dolby and Fraunhofer are setting up this patent pool, so yes.
pashadee 4y ago
Vectis is a dumpster fire. This is an attempt to prevent hardware for multi channel opus, for use in film/TV, and eventually inhibit the open source CODECs. Because only Dolby is allowed to have hardware for this.
jefftk 4y ago
Context: Opus was specifically designed to avoid known existing patents, except for ones that are available royalty-free [1]. If Fraunhofer and Dolby believed Opus infringed on their patents they could have said so a decade ago, but instead they've waited for it to become widely deployed. This is also a peculiar choice from Dolby because the patents that do cover Opus are licensed with an exception for companies that sue saying they have patents covering Opus [2]. Dolby has at least one product that uses Opus [3] so if this pool goes ahead and sues someone then it looks like Dolby is open to being sued themselves. [1] https://www.opus-codec.org/license/ https://www.opus-codec.org/license/ [2] "If you ... file a Claim for patent infringement against any entity alleging that an Implementation in whole or in part constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement ... then any patent rights granted to you under this License shall automatically terminate retroactively as of the date you first received the grant." [3] https://professional.dolby.com/product/dolby-voice/dolby-voice-room/ https://professional.dolby.com/product/dolby-voice/dolby-voi...
fabiorug 4y ago
opus uses some things of usac
akomtu 4y ago
If Opus was a kind of tree, a maple, that's got very popular in the country, and a gang of sketchy "enterpreneurs" came to a judge and claimed that all these maples in the country belong to them now, because they've come to possession of a piece of toilet paper with a word "maple" on it, would the judge order to cut down all the maples?

206 points by teilo 4y ago

It looks like Fraunhoffer and Dolby are going after hardware devices using the Opus codec. 'The planned Opus program will focus on hardware devices and will not be directed towards open-source software, applications, services, or content. '“We are pleased to act as administrator in the development of this important patent pool which aims to support efficient, fair, and transparent access to hundreds of patents covering technologies used in the Opus codec,” said Giustino de Sanctis, CEO of Vectis IP. “The reasonable royalty rates of this pool will balance the interests of both the program’s innovators and end-user device manufacturers whose products benefit from use of these patented technologies.” 'Vectis IP expects to launch the program in the coming months and for the program to include access to hundreds of patents with a royalty rate in the range of €15-20c per unit. Royalties for willing licensees will be applicable from the program launch, with further incentives available for licensees that promptly execute a pool license. 'Vectis IP welcomes other innovators with patents essential to Opus to submit applications for consideration in the program at opus@vectis.com.' In other words: Yeah, we know that the IETF put out an IPR on Opus years ago. We don't care. We smell money.

chrismorgan 4y ago
> we know that the IETF put out an IPR on Opus years ago As in, over a decade ago. (Though they are covering more recent work in their patent pool, explicitly including stuff that they declare the planned program will not be directed toward.)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Conan_Kudo 4y ago
Holy shit, €15 a unit? That's insane!
- zamadatix 4y ago
  I think it’s a botched formatting attempt to say 15-20 Euro cents not 15 euros to 20 cents
  - Conan_Kudo 4y ago
    Oh, that makes way more sense. 15c is still high, but not insane.

teilo 4y ago

More information: https://www.opuspool.com/ https://www.opuspool.com/

yarg 4y ago
Is there any more information from someone who isn't them?
- teilo 4y ago
  Nothing but blurbs on IP news websites that add nothing.

rektide 4y ago

Vultures coming to take claims to a codec which, I understand, was fairly carefully built to be actually open. That it is only persecuting hardware inplementations gives me little relief. Low power hardware blocks should be readily available & usable, be a great help to making computers & sound devices better, with low power consumption. This is, as much as anything, a huge blow against making bluetooth generally good & better; a great potential general use codec, encumbered! Alas! Make sure we cant use anything but locked-in overpriced proprietary codecs. Keep standards from actually developing healthily, fighting a 10+ year old codec from growing. Everyone associated with this patent pool should be blocked from the OIN patent pool immediately & with malice. Alas OIN is too old to have defenses against these here new crust of aggro lawyering stasists.

markvdb 4y ago
Hyenas, not vultures. Vultures don't hunt themselves.
- jvickers 4y ago
  What do you mean? Hyenas hunt hyenas? Hyenas hunt?
  - markvdb 4y ago
    Vultures are mainly carrion-eaters, scavengers. Hyenas mainly hunt actively, often in coordinated groups, and not just for the weakest animals. Opus being a healthy codec, and the attempt at a coordinated attack make the hyena analogy seems more appropriate, to me at least.
Taniwha 4y ago
What's even is a "hardware implementation"? does it include a PC consumer box the software?

teilo 4y ago

This is probably behind Oracle's move to remove Opus from Virtualbox recordings and revert to Vorbis, as of v.7. There are a LOT of commercial apps using Opus. Like Skype. The fact that they are only going after hardware at present will brings Apple into the mix, because iOS devices support Opus. This should be interesting.

rockdoe 4y ago
There are a LOT of commercial apps using Opus. Like Skype. It's more like - Opus' voice part IS Skype. Skype contributed all their patents, technologies and key engineers to the development of Opus.
mappu 4y ago
There are known patents on Opus held by Xiph.org, Broadcom and Microsoft, all made freely available. But as per https://opus-codec.org/license/ https://opus-codec.org/license/ if you try patent litigation against anyone, your license to use any of these free patents is revoked. So there's not many ways this pool can work. A company can only join it if they want to give up on ever using Opus themselves. It's a really crazy move from Dolby since they have at least a few products that use Opus ( https://professional.dolby.com/product/dolby-voice/dolby-voice-room/ https://professional.dolby.com/product/dolby-voice/dolby-voi... , https://docs.dolby.io/communications-apis/docs/guides-dolby-voice https://docs.dolby.io/communications-apis/docs/guides-dolby-... , likely more)
- bscphil 4y ago
  > It's a really crazy move from Dolby since they have at least a few products that use Opus Seems like the strategy here is going to be to use FUD to leech small amounts of money from individual hardware device sales from the companies that can afford to pay it. It's just rent seeking. So long as they never actually sue anyone for their use of Opus, it seems like they'll be in the clear as far as the Opus license goes.
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    Sounds almost more like extortion. Edit: wouldn't it be pretty easy to call this bluff? you don't even have to try to win the court case, you just have to get them to sue you and immediately lose their license, or to admit that they can't sue you because they don't want to lose their own license, and the whole thing falls apart.

yarg 4y ago

There will never be an end to this bullshit. If the patent system sought to promote innovation, rather than stiffle it, we'd stop using "first to file" and move to "all to independently derive". Yes, independent derivation may still end up in court - but there's at least reasonable standards of evidence either way.

gorgoiler 4y ago
Are you saying that anyone who independently derived the mechanism — before the first machine was made public or the patent diagrams were published — should also be granted the patent? Once your rival has manufactured and sold their sausage making machine you can take it apart to see how it works. Perhaps you just claim you’ve never done this?
- CogitoCogito 4y ago
  > Are you saying that anyone who independently derived the mechanism — before the first machine was made public or the patent diagrams were published — should also be granted the patent? You seem incredulous that a "first to invent" system could work, but US moved away from that system less than a decade ago. Edit: Never mind the first post was about independent derivations. That's not the same thing. My mistake.
- yarg 4y ago
  Do I need to quote myself? I said things will still end up in court - and the end-product in the example that you're giving will be too similar to the patented invention to stand up in court.
MereInterest 4y ago
Even better, "none to independently derive". Patents must be non-obvious. I would take independent invention as evidence that the patent should never have been granted in the first place.
- yarg 4y ago
  They must be non-obvious to an expert in the field. In theory that's a strictly tighter constraint than non-obvious, although it's impossible to actually implement. However, independent invention isn't necessarily a proof that the particular patent should not have been granted. Often, it is not the solution but its problem space that's obvious. There tends to be a finite domain of reasonable solutions, and solutions converge to that domain. In which case you probably want some sort of thicket busting legislation.

croes 4y ago

*Fraunhofer

Test0129 4y ago

On one hand I believe the theoretical patent is very important to promote innovation. If you, the inventor, can get guarantees on your sales for 10 years (which is reasonable, imo) then it'll encourage people to make more stuff. I don't think patents are wrong. However, the way patents are filed is wrong. There's so many issues with first to file. It's a good system when your office sees 100 patents a year. All of them are likely to be novel, and likely to be made by independent inventors. The problem we have now is there are entire companies (IBM, Google, RAND, TI, etc) that exist solely to farm patents. In fact, there are so many patent farms disguised as businesses I challenge you to sit, think of something, and search for a patent for it. I guarantee you one exists. Moreover, pursue the patent office if you never have. The definition of invention, especially in tech, is so vague it may as well not exist. Vomit some smart sounding stuff on paper with drawings and you've got yourself a patent that, if written correctly, will almost certainly produce a profit. Hell, take a cat and draw a stereo speaker on top of it. Call it "animal sound machine". I guarantee you if it hasn't already been done someone will do it. Better, draw a cat with a USB stick duct taped to it and call it "IP over Feline". Devise a stupid protocol. Then sue every idiot who thought it'd be funny to make one. This is seriously how lame modern patent law is. You might even be infringing on a patent with IP over Feline because someone already "invented" transportable storage. I don't have a solution to the problem. Part of me wants to say one patent, per inventor, per term (10 years). You have the option of canceling a patent to put a new one in. But this seems like it's too strong. Maybe there's another way that legitimate inventors for an appropriate amount of time, and also disincentivizes patent trolls through some measure. Maybe we could start with "common good" patents (as determined by a board of smart people) being invalidated.

alexforster 4y ago
> In fact, there are so many patent farms disguised as businesses I challenge you to sit, think of something, and search for a patent for it. Nice try, Opposing Counsel.
- dontlaugh 4y ago
  Heh. Don't read patents.

choeger 4y ago

After so many years that idea should be laughed at at court. Patents are one thing but waiting for your "free" codec to gain usage across the world only then to reap the benefits should be called fraud.

Gigachad 4y ago
It’s also just a sign of how broken the system is. These companies didn’t contribute anything to the creation of opus. The codec would have still existed since it was designed explicitly to avoid existing patents.
jpalomaki 4y ago
I've understood the trademark system works so that you need to constantly defend your trademarks to keep them valid. Maybe something similar should be applied to patents.
gruez 4y ago
Unfortunately I don't know of any legal theory that would actually cause a judge to rule this as fraud. Unlike trademarks for instance, there's no requirement for you to actively defend a patent to have it be valid.
- mindslight 4y ago
  Estoppel. The development process was highly publicized and the relevant entities surely knew about the call for patent claims. And possibly laches. Patents are highly dependent on the technological context of when they're written. The Opus development process deliberately sought to avoid existing patents, and trying to reverse these judgements a decade later is disingenuous.

mngnt 4y ago

Okay, maybe I'm missing something here, but how? Per wikipedia (1), opus is licenesed under bsd license. More relevant, on their own site(2) they tout opus as "a totally open, royalty-free" codec. My question is, how can someone just step in, say "this mine, give money" and the world just goes with it? Did the opus developers (inadvertendly) use some patented tech? Do hardware makers use it? Or do Dolby and Fraunhofer have patents so broad that they cover anything encoding audio? (1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_(audio_format) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_(audio_format) (2) https://opus-codec.org/ https://opus-codec.org/

masklinn 4y ago
> Did the opus developers (inadvertendly) use some patented tech? That’s certainly the claim since it’s a patent pool. > Do hardware makers use it? If it’s a fundamental building block of opus then necessarily, no?
- GoblinSlayer 4y ago
  Hardware codecs are just generic applications of VHDL and integrated circuits. Making integrated circuits work is a legitimate challenge, but that's an integrated circuits patent, not a codec patent.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
> My question is, how can someone just step in, say "this mine, give money" and the world just goes with it? It's called violence. Might is right [1] means the world goes along out of fear, not agreement. Violence need not appear physical, but is always backed up by physical violence in the end. There's no irony that so-called "intellectual property" is backed up by thugs with guns. Whatever noble aims patents began with they are now nothing more than a form of violent "political language" against the intellectual classes, designed, as Orwell said, to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Might_Is_Right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Might_Is_Right [2] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

ggm 4y ago

I'd love to see a well written defence of their position. Frauenhoffer and Dolby both employ smart people. If they put smarts out into the world, which people leveraged to do smart++ then there's a component of "ok, so pay the tax" on this but given the IETF side, even with IETF IPR statements, this sounds like they misunderstood the RAND goal. or is EUR 20c per unit for hardware 'reasonable' -on Apple volumes, thats a lot of money.

ksec 4y ago
>or is EUR 20c per unit for hardware 'reasonable' -on Apple volumes, thats a lot of money. Apple thought they should only paid $1.5 / unit to Qualcomm for all of Qualcomm's patents. 20c per unit is a lot for single type of patents with limited coverage. Their "reasonable" range is probably 1c per unit. Which is still about $3M / year.
hamandcheese 4y ago
Compared to Apple's profits, it's not much.
- jamiek88 4y ago
  Apple defends margin like a goose defends its goslings. They won’t see it that way.
KerrAvon 4y ago
It’s not a hardware feature and it’s not essential to Apple’s business. If the trolls insist that it is, Apple can and should nuke the extremely limited software support they have for it.

girvo 4y ago

As a secondary point to this, is AV1 also at risk of this kind of rent-seeking behaviour? It's also claimed to be patent-and-royalty-free, as does Opus. These companies who step on tech innovation to collect their pound of flesh are disgusting to me.

gardaani 4y ago
Yes, of course. Sisvel is already selling a license for their AV1 patent pool: https://www.sisvel.com/licensing-programs/audio-and-video-coding-decoding/video-coding-platform/license-terms/av1-license-terms https://www.sisvel.com/licensing-programs/audio-and-video-co... AOMedia fights against this with its defense program: "Established the AOMedia patent defense program to help protect AV1 ecosystem participants in the event of patent claims" https://aomedia.org/press%20releases/the-alliance-for-open-media-statement/ https://aomedia.org/press%20releases/the-alliance-for-open-m...
- arlcode 4y ago
  Do we know how successful their claim is. I've not followed that too much. It makes sense to go after hardware vebdors, because that is where the money is and shaking down open source software users is a lot of work and bad press.
  - tadfisher 4y ago
    I've yet to hear of them suing Intel, who recently shipped hardware AV1 encoding in their GPUs. So either Intel is paying up or the pool doesn't want to poke the bear.

walterbell 4y ago

Isn't Opus used by WebRTC, i.e. this would break the many video conferencing systems which have made WFH and online conferences possible for the last couple of years? That's a rather large class of customers to troll.

corndoge 4y ago
No, which is explained in TFA
- walterbell 4y ago
  Because of the 'hardware' clause? What stops them from expanding the scope later? Why would any business want to use a codec associated with patent trolls? Are there other IETF protocols subject to retroactive patents?
  - chrismorgan 4y ago
    > What stops them from expanding the scope later? Especially given that they explicitly include software in the patent pool subject matter! From https://www.opuspool.com/ https://www.opuspool.com/: > The Opus pool license covers the specifications […], and the official software releases of the Opus audio codec, […]
  - girvo 4y ago
    > What stops them from expanding the scope later Absolutely nothing, because their own patent pool docs state that software is fair game. It's gross beyond belief.

errantmind 4y ago

Software patents, and patents in general, are a plague on the industry and should be abolished due to a lack of empirical evidence to justify their existence. As a thought experiment they make sense, but thought experiments often diverge from reality. The Case Against Patents: https://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/more/2012-035 https://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/more/2012-035

CorrectHorseBat 4y ago
Seems like they are going after hardware implementations, not software (not that that's much better).
- chrismorgan 4y ago
  So they claim. But they’re also explicitly including software in the scope of the pool itself.
- russdill 4y ago
  That's can be a super hard line to draw as many hardware implementations are just firmware running on hardware with some specialized dsp instructions.
- Namidairo 4y ago
  I wonder if this could stifle (hardware) use of the RFC Opus over A2DP vendor codec that was slowly coming together on Pipewire. (Which is kind of in the chicken-egg position where there's no hardware to receive it outside of other pipewire clients anyway.) Edit: It's already merged and ready for use, and is the only thing that'll do multi-channel audio over bluetooth?
  - nyanpasu64 4y ago
    I'm hoping to add support for Opus to the upcoming PineBuds Pro, but no guarantees I'll be able to accomplish it at my current skill level. So far I couldn't even get the first SDK to compile (https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineBuds_Pro https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineBuds_Pro).

vintermann 4y ago

Maybe we can argue that since there's a war going on and all that, we can no longer tolerate this sort of leeching. Attack it as unpatriotic. I mean, it is. It's the least way it's disgusting, but it's still perfectly true.

Aachen 4y ago

Opus is a decade old, any patents would have to be filed before then or Opus would be prior work, and they're issued only for 20 years, right? At least for the software, which they claim not to be going after (but who'd trust a software patent lawyer). Any software implementations such as in VirtualBox, who just switched back to Vorbis from Opus, would be perfectly safe in at most ten years, perhaps already today. Am I understanding this right, at least for the software part?

nullc 4y ago
Most of Opus is quite a bit older than that too a decade is for the final standard but the project began in earnest in 2007 and many components came from earlier work.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

It's best understood through the lens of FUD against both a specific competitor codec and a competing standards methodology. Fraunhofer and Dolby make money from patent royalties on standards. If standards no longer want patents or royalties, then they are out of business. It's obviously going that way long term, but in the meantime a bit of "Linux is cancer/communism" type FUD will more than pay for itself in extending their patent royalty collecting time.

rockdoe 4y ago
This is the correct way to understand it. Dolby sells a bunch of codecs, and Fraunhofer sells USAC (which is basically Opus with some patented stuff added on). Their problem is that Opus serves many of those use cases for free. They can't allow that to happen, so scaring potential customers away is good for business.

crest 4y ago

sylware 4y ago

long time we have not seen a patent troll taking on major open source components. proxy from companies of mpeg?

rockdoe 4y ago
They're literally saying Dolby and Fraunhofer are setting up this patent pool, so yes.

pashadee 4y ago

Vectis is a dumpster fire. This is an attempt to prevent hardware for multi channel opus, for use in film/TV, and eventually inhibit the open source CODECs. Because only Dolby is allowed to have hardware for this.

jefftk 4y ago

Context: Opus was specifically designed to avoid known existing patents, except for ones that are available royalty-free [1]. If Fraunhofer and Dolby believed Opus infringed on their patents they could have said so a decade ago, but instead they've waited for it to become widely deployed. This is also a peculiar choice from Dolby because the patents that do cover Opus are licensed with an exception for companies that sue saying they have patents covering Opus [2]. Dolby has at least one product that uses Opus [3] so if this pool goes ahead and sues someone then it looks like Dolby is open to being sued themselves. [1] https://www.opus-codec.org/license/ https://www.opus-codec.org/license/ [2] "If you ... file a Claim for patent infringement against any entity alleging that an Implementation in whole or in part constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement ... then any patent rights granted to you under this License shall automatically terminate retroactively as of the date you first received the grant." [3] https://professional.dolby.com/product/dolby-voice/dolby-voice-room/ https://professional.dolby.com/product/dolby-voice/dolby-voi...

fabiorug 4y ago

opus uses some things of usac

akomtu 4y ago

If Opus was a kind of tree, a maple, that's got very popular in the country, and a gang of sketchy "enterpreneurs" came to a judge and claimed that all these maples in the country belong to them now, because they've come to possession of a piece of toilet paper with a word "maple" on it, would the judge order to cut down all the maples?