5 ms·

Nokia sues Amazon, HP over video compression technology

helsinkiandrew 3y ago
Nokia's blog post about litigation: https://www.nokia.com/blog/nokia-seeks-compensation-for-amazons-use-of-our-patented-multimedia-inventions/ https://www.nokia.com/blog/nokia-seeks-compensation-for-amaz...
brucethemoose2 3y ago
> While Nokia's complaint against Amazon concerned streaming video, its complaint against HP involved the company's desktop and laptop computers, which allegedly contained the same proprietary H.264 and H.265 technology. I have not read Nokia's brief, but that is particularly eyebrow raising. Is Microsoft shipping h264 as a OEM MS Store app like they do for HEVC these days? Either that, or they must be shipping bloatware with AVC, otherwise it seems the buck would stop with Intel/AMD/Nvidia/Microsoft, not HP. All this is just another nail in the coffin for VVC though. No one big enough to get sued wants to touch it with a 10 foot pole, and Nokia has justified the paranoia once again.
- fweimer 3y ago
  I thought that with patents, each entity among the manufacturing chain potentially needs a license? There is no analog for the first sale doctrine, or neither a requirement for consistent enforcement (as is there for trademarks).
  - brucethemoose2 3y ago
    As far as hardware decoding goes, I thought chipmakers paid the fee for everyone down the line? Otherwise... thats pretty horrific. Would businesses using HP laptops en masse be exposed too?
    - fweimer 3y ago
      Certainly not for everyone. Even if you buy professional videoconferencing equipment for business purposes, you do not get a patent license for its commercial use. Those paid offerings typically come with terms similar to the ones Cisco includes in their free Open264 builds: THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR THE PERSONAL USE OF A CONSUMER OR OTHER USES IN WHICH IT DOES NOT RECEIVE REMUNERATION TO (i) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC STANDARD (“AVC VIDEO”) AND/OR (ii) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL ACTIVITY AND/OR WAS OBTAINED FROM A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO. https://www.openh264.org/BINARY_LICENSE.txt https://www.openh264.org/BINARY_LICENSE.txt I'm not sure if if the relevant patent pools even have incoming licensing coverage for live Internet video because that arrived only after the pools had long been established.
  - derf_ 3y ago
    > There is no analog for the first sale doctrine... There is. It is called patent exhaustion. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaustion_doctrine_under_U.S._law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaustion_doctrine_under_U.S.... There was a fad of issuing a "covenant not to sue" in lieu of a license, specifically to try to avoid triggering exhaustion, but courts seem to be (correctly, in my IANAL opinion) treating them as licenses anyway. See, e.g., https://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2013/01/3rd-circuit-covenant-not-to-sue-is-a-license-and-therefore-not-dischargeable-in-bankruptcy.html https://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2013/01/3rd-circuit-covenan...
    - fweimer 3y ago
      But isn't that easily avoided by suitably scoping the license grant?
      - derf_ 3y ago
        I would not say "easily"... patent holders will absolutely try to avoid the effects of exhaustion by imposing post-sale or field-of-use restrictions, but lawsuits about it have gone to the Supreme Court, e.g., https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/553/617/ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/553/617/ (and not worked out well for the patent holder).
GJR 3y ago
Nokia must be desperate for cash. Developing video codecs is a painful exercise as some part of the implementation almost always relies on prior art. The company that I worked for were sued for our implementation of an MPEG-2 codec, because of a similar patent owned by a troll. These cases are what hold innovation back and are only attractive to the trolls because of how many h.264/h.265 codec instances are running out there. The usual technique is to go for the little guys first and then move up the food chain.
- sublimefire 3y ago
  Given the patents were issued in '00s and they expire after 20 years it looks like the last chance to monetize them.
- tpmx 3y ago
  > The usual technique is to go for the little guys first and then move up the food chain. Stating the obvious: That's hardly the case here.
  - logdap 3y ago
    And most patent trolls are just a few jackass lawyers, not large established companies like Nokia.
  - acdha 3y ago
    I drew the opposite conclusion: > The patents were at the center of a legal dispute involving Lenovo in 2020, in which the computer maker claimed Nokia did not fully disclose its intellectual property interest to the ITU and ISO while the bodies were working to standardize H.264. That lawsuit was settled one year later, with Lenovo and Nokia agreeing on a cross-licensing agreement. That looks like patent trolling to me: sue someone who’s not really in the business and settle so when you sue a bigger player you can tell the judge that this other company did the right thing and paid for your incredibly critical technology.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
TheRealPomax 3y ago
Does anyone know the "why now" for this litigation? I had a look at Nokia's own blog post about this, but it's unclear why they sat on this for years.
- burnte 3y ago
  Presumably negotiations were going no where and they felt HP would never really settle it.
- thedaly 3y ago
  It was mentioned elsewhere in this thread that the patents were issued in the early 00s and were valid for 20 years, so they will be expiring soon.
- callalex 3y ago
  Patents last for 20 years and these were granted in the mid 00’s. They’re milking the last drops out of their cow.
  - TheRealPomax 3y ago
    I am not a lawyer, so: even if a patent expires, that doesn't make patent violation commit in the past "not a crime anymore" does it? It's still subject to the statute of limitations? And if they knew their patents were being violated but didn't sue, isn't there also the "sue's it or loose it" clause that can be invoked to get the case thrown out?
photoGrant 3y ago
"Did you know, for example, that content optimization on your device’s screen when switching between portrait and landscape video is a Nokia invention? And fast forwarding or rewinding a video by scrolling through it, while simultaneously displaying the current scene"
- esaym 3y ago
  That is actually a direct quote lol
- callalex 3y ago
  Sheesh, I should patent urinating after drinking a beverage, that’s about as novel of an invention.
- coreyp_1 3y ago
  As for fast forward and rewind while seeing the current scene, we did this back in the days of the VCR. Are they claiming to have invented that?
  - themoonisachees 3y ago
    A VCR would simply display the frames that happened to pass by the read heads while rewinding. When doing that digitally, your codec decides if that is even feasible. If the codec optimizes for disk space, generating any frame requires going through all previous frames. If the codec optimizes for fast scrubbing, the file must contain redundant information and thus be larger. Nokia is claiming that h264's checkpointing mechanisms allow for that (empirically, this is indeed a feature of h264) and it is therefore their invention. I'm unaware if previous codecs had similar mechanisms. It would be wierd of none had, but it wouldn't surprise me that much.
    - brucethemoose2 3y ago
      MPEG2 has I, P, and B, frames, so unless they "refreshed" the patent is somehow old, someone at Nokia just came up with the scrubbing idea using the existing implementation. ...But video players have had scrubbing bars for a long time? I'm not sure how long, my memory on Windows on XP and older is fuzzy.
zoobab 3y ago
Nokia is also a judge at the Unified Patent Court: https://ffii.org/nokia-and-airbus-elected-as-judges-at-the-kangaroo-unified-patent-court-kupc/ https://ffii.org/nokia-and-airbus-elected-as-judges-at-the-k... This Court is a Kangaroo one.
- tpmx 3y ago
  That East Texas court comes to mind...
tombert 3y ago
It's not perfect, but h264 is generally "pretty good", and presumably its patents should be expiring in the next few years. At that point, we will (hopefully) finally have a codec that's supported basically everywhere, has pretty decent "quality to size" ratio, and will cost nothing to license. Of course, by that point I'm sure everyone will have moved onto HEVC or something, but a guy can dream of this utopia.
- justinrstout 3y ago
  FWIW we currently have this in the AV1 codec which is royalty-free and has a better quality/size ratio than h264.
  - tombert 3y ago
    AV1 looks very cool but it doesn't have nearly the level of compatibility that H264 has. H264 works out of the box on browsers, as well as having hardware support on phones and SBCs and set-top-boxes and whatnot. AV1 might eventually get there, and that would be awesome if it does, but H264 has been around long enough to have a substantial "first mover advantage" over AV1.
    - buttersbrian 3y ago
      Fair, but that's a matter of time it seems. I think AV1 is a good bet.
      - tombert 3y ago
        Yeah, no question; H264 had a 10+ year head start and entrenched itself as part of the Blu-ray and online video sharing space. Once AV1 has similarly-largely-scoped things then it'll probably take a lot of h264's market, and it'll be royalty-free from the get-go. I definitely want AV1 to become the "video standard to rule them all", but once H264's patents expire I think I'm also ok with it being the standard as well.
    - papichulo2023 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tillinghast 3y ago
Corporate death rattle.
Kim_Bruning 3y ago
Hopefully standardization committees in future will have learned to commit to open source, open licensing, mutual patent retaliation, or at least some method to prevent one defector from actually suing all the rest.
advael 3y ago
Software patents are dumb, no exceptions Then again, I think IP is a bad paradigm that does more harm than good in general
ratsmack 3y ago
The hallmarks of a dying company... attempting to sue everyone until you become profitable. It worked out pretty well for SCO.
oliwarner 3y ago
I think if you sit on your thumbs for 20 years while MPEG LA sell "your IP" without your permission, and in such a globally obvious way, you forfeit all right to that IP. Especially at the eleventh hour, like this. Especially when companies like Nokia are so used to the patent process. They have no excuse here. Lenovo were idiots to settle. They fed the troll and now it's back.
Mrirazak1 3y ago
wait this company is still alive?
nirvanaman2k13 3y ago
nokia vs amazon u.s lawsuit document: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67928543/1/nokia-technologies-oy-v-amazoncom-inc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67928543/1/nokia-techno... nokia vs hp u.s lawsuit document: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67928650/1/nokia-technologies-oy-v-hp-inc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67928650/1/nokia-techno...

Nokia's blog post about litigation: https://www.nokia.com/blog/nokia-seeks-compensation-for-amazons-use-of-our-patented-multimedia-inventions/ https://www.nokia.com/blog/nokia-seeks-compensation-for-amaz...

brucethemoose2 3y ago

> While Nokia's complaint against Amazon concerned streaming video, its complaint against HP involved the company's desktop and laptop computers, which allegedly contained the same proprietary H.264 and H.265 technology. I have not read Nokia's brief, but that is particularly eyebrow raising. Is Microsoft shipping h264 as a OEM MS Store app like they do for HEVC these days? Either that, or they must be shipping bloatware with AVC, otherwise it seems the buck would stop with Intel/AMD/Nvidia/Microsoft, not HP. All this is just another nail in the coffin for VVC though. No one big enough to get sued wants to touch it with a 10 foot pole, and Nokia has justified the paranoia once again.

fweimer 3y ago
I thought that with patents, each entity among the manufacturing chain potentially needs a license? There is no analog for the first sale doctrine, or neither a requirement for consistent enforcement (as is there for trademarks).
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  As far as hardware decoding goes, I thought chipmakers paid the fee for everyone down the line? Otherwise... thats pretty horrific. Would businesses using HP laptops en masse be exposed too?
  - fweimer 3y ago
    Certainly not for everyone. Even if you buy professional videoconferencing equipment for business purposes, you do not get a patent license for its commercial use. Those paid offerings typically come with terms similar to the ones Cisco includes in their free Open264 builds: THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR THE PERSONAL USE OF A CONSUMER OR OTHER USES IN WHICH IT DOES NOT RECEIVE REMUNERATION TO (i) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC STANDARD (“AVC VIDEO”) AND/OR (ii) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL ACTIVITY AND/OR WAS OBTAINED FROM A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO. https://www.openh264.org/BINARY_LICENSE.txt https://www.openh264.org/BINARY_LICENSE.txt I'm not sure if if the relevant patent pools even have incoming licensing coverage for live Internet video because that arrived only after the pools had long been established.
- derf_ 3y ago
  > There is no analog for the first sale doctrine... There is. It is called patent exhaustion. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaustion_doctrine_under_U.S._law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaustion_doctrine_under_U.S.... There was a fad of issuing a "covenant not to sue" in lieu of a license, specifically to try to avoid triggering exhaustion, but courts seem to be (correctly, in my IANAL opinion) treating them as licenses anyway. See, e.g., https://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2013/01/3rd-circuit-covenant-not-to-sue-is-a-license-and-therefore-not-dischargeable-in-bankruptcy.html https://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2013/01/3rd-circuit-covenan...
  - fweimer 3y ago
    But isn't that easily avoided by suitably scoping the license grant?
    - derf_ 3y ago
      I would not say "easily"... patent holders will absolutely try to avoid the effects of exhaustion by imposing post-sale or field-of-use restrictions, but lawsuits about it have gone to the Supreme Court, e.g., https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/553/617/ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/553/617/ (and not worked out well for the patent holder).

GJR 3y ago

Nokia must be desperate for cash. Developing video codecs is a painful exercise as some part of the implementation almost always relies on prior art. The company that I worked for were sued for our implementation of an MPEG-2 codec, because of a similar patent owned by a troll. These cases are what hold innovation back and are only attractive to the trolls because of how many h.264/h.265 codec instances are running out there. The usual technique is to go for the little guys first and then move up the food chain.

sublimefire 3y ago
Given the patents were issued in '00s and they expire after 20 years it looks like the last chance to monetize them.
tpmx 3y ago
> The usual technique is to go for the little guys first and then move up the food chain. Stating the obvious: That's hardly the case here.
- logdap 3y ago
  And most patent trolls are just a few jackass lawyers, not large established companies like Nokia.
- acdha 3y ago
  I drew the opposite conclusion: > The patents were at the center of a legal dispute involving Lenovo in 2020, in which the computer maker claimed Nokia did not fully disclose its intellectual property interest to the ITU and ISO while the bodies were working to standardize H.264. That lawsuit was settled one year later, with Lenovo and Nokia agreeing on a cross-licensing agreement. That looks like patent trolling to me: sue someone who’s not really in the business and settle so when you sue a bigger player you can tell the judge that this other company did the right thing and paid for your incredibly critical technology.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

TheRealPomax 3y ago

Does anyone know the "why now" for this litigation? I had a look at Nokia's own blog post about this, but it's unclear why they sat on this for years.

burnte 3y ago
Presumably negotiations were going no where and they felt HP would never really settle it.
thedaly 3y ago
It was mentioned elsewhere in this thread that the patents were issued in the early 00s and were valid for 20 years, so they will be expiring soon.
callalex 3y ago
Patents last for 20 years and these were granted in the mid 00’s. They’re milking the last drops out of their cow.
- TheRealPomax 3y ago
  I am not a lawyer, so: even if a patent expires, that doesn't make patent violation commit in the past "not a crime anymore" does it? It's still subject to the statute of limitations? And if they knew their patents were being violated but didn't sue, isn't there also the "sue's it or loose it" clause that can be invoked to get the case thrown out?

photoGrant 3y ago

"Did you know, for example, that content optimization on your device’s screen when switching between portrait and landscape video is a Nokia invention? And fast forwarding or rewinding a video by scrolling through it, while simultaneously displaying the current scene"

esaym 3y ago
That is actually a direct quote lol
callalex 3y ago
Sheesh, I should patent urinating after drinking a beverage, that’s about as novel of an invention.
coreyp_1 3y ago
As for fast forward and rewind while seeing the current scene, we did this back in the days of the VCR. Are they claiming to have invented that?
- themoonisachees 3y ago
  A VCR would simply display the frames that happened to pass by the read heads while rewinding. When doing that digitally, your codec decides if that is even feasible. If the codec optimizes for disk space, generating any frame requires going through all previous frames. If the codec optimizes for fast scrubbing, the file must contain redundant information and thus be larger. Nokia is claiming that h264's checkpointing mechanisms allow for that (empirically, this is indeed a feature of h264) and it is therefore their invention. I'm unaware if previous codecs had similar mechanisms. It would be wierd of none had, but it wouldn't surprise me that much.
  - brucethemoose2 3y ago
    MPEG2 has I, P, and B, frames, so unless they "refreshed" the patent is somehow old, someone at Nokia just came up with the scrubbing idea using the existing implementation. ...But video players have had scrubbing bars for a long time? I'm not sure how long, my memory on Windows on XP and older is fuzzy.

zoobab 3y ago

Nokia is also a judge at the Unified Patent Court: https://ffii.org/nokia-and-airbus-elected-as-judges-at-the-kangaroo-unified-patent-court-kupc/ https://ffii.org/nokia-and-airbus-elected-as-judges-at-the-k... This Court is a Kangaroo one.

tpmx 3y ago
That East Texas court comes to mind...

tombert 3y ago

It's not perfect, but h264 is generally "pretty good", and presumably its patents should be expiring in the next few years. At that point, we will (hopefully) finally have a codec that's supported basically everywhere, has pretty decent "quality to size" ratio, and will cost nothing to license. Of course, by that point I'm sure everyone will have moved onto HEVC or something, but a guy can dream of this utopia.

justinrstout 3y ago
FWIW we currently have this in the AV1 codec which is royalty-free and has a better quality/size ratio than h264.
- tombert 3y ago
  AV1 looks very cool but it doesn't have nearly the level of compatibility that H264 has. H264 works out of the box on browsers, as well as having hardware support on phones and SBCs and set-top-boxes and whatnot. AV1 might eventually get there, and that would be awesome if it does, but H264 has been around long enough to have a substantial "first mover advantage" over AV1.
  - buttersbrian 3y ago
    Fair, but that's a matter of time it seems. I think AV1 is a good bet.
    - tombert 3y ago
      Yeah, no question; H264 had a 10+ year head start and entrenched itself as part of the Blu-ray and online video sharing space. Once AV1 has similarly-largely-scoped things then it'll probably take a lot of h264's market, and it'll be royalty-free from the get-go. I definitely want AV1 to become the "video standard to rule them all", but once H264's patents expire I think I'm also ok with it being the standard as well.
  - papichulo2023 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

tillinghast 3y ago

Corporate death rattle.

Kim_Bruning 3y ago

Hopefully standardization committees in future will have learned to commit to open source, open licensing, mutual patent retaliation, or at least some method to prevent one defector from actually suing all the rest.

advael 3y ago

Software patents are dumb, no exceptions Then again, I think IP is a bad paradigm that does more harm than good in general

ratsmack 3y ago

The hallmarks of a dying company... attempting to sue everyone until you become profitable. It worked out pretty well for SCO.

oliwarner 3y ago

I think if you sit on your thumbs for 20 years while MPEG LA sell "your IP" without your permission, and in such a globally obvious way, you forfeit all right to that IP. Especially at the eleventh hour, like this. Especially when companies like Nokia are so used to the patent process. They have no excuse here. Lenovo were idiots to settle. They fed the troll and now it's back.

Mrirazak1 3y ago

wait this company is still alive?

nirvanaman2k13 3y ago

nokia vs amazon u.s lawsuit document: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67928543/1/nokia-technologies-oy-v-amazoncom-inc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67928543/1/nokia-techno... nokia vs hp u.s lawsuit document: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67928650/1/nokia-technologies-oy-v-hp-inc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67928650/1/nokia-techno...