4 ms·

I love this. This is what you get for betting on patent encumbered formats. Maybe WebM wasn't such a bad idea after all...

taligent 14y ago
You don't get it do you. EVERY company in the industry has now been given carte blanche to completely ignore FRAND principles and sue everyone after a standard has been adopted. This is the worst precedent to hit the industry in a long time.
- pavanky 14y ago
  I am a bit unaware of the situation, but didnt this lawsuit happen after MS sued Motorola over android ?
  - shrikant 14y ago
    Yes indeed: http://www.mobiledia.com/news/104161.html http://www.mobiledia.com/news/104161.html Microsoft Wants to Ban Motorola Phones in U.S. "Motorola is infringing our patents and we are confident that the ITC will rule in our favor," said David Howard, Microsoft's deputy general counsel for litigation. "We are vigorously defending ourselves against Microsoft's patent attack business strategy," said Motorola in a responding statement. "We have also brought legal actions of our own in the U.S. and in Europe to address Microsoft's large scale of infringement of Motorola Mobility's patents." He who lives by the sword...
- ZeroGravitas 14y ago
  Not if it leads to patent-backed FRAND being abandoned for something better, like allowing standards to be freely implemented by anyone at no cost regardless of who claims patents on them and then standards committees can spend their time on engineering not lawyering, politics and FUD.
- phoboslab 14y ago
  It's not clear that Motorola didn't offer "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms" for licensing. Microsoft claims licensing would cost them $4bn/year; Motorola disputes this claim. Also, who is to say that $4bn/year isn't "fair" when video is an essential part of Microsofts products? Don't get me wrong, I hate patents as much as everyone else here, but I still think this lawsuit poses as a very nice example of why free video/audio codecs are important. We had the same shit with LZW/GIF patents a decade earlier and all the warnings were ignored and laughed at ("Nerds with tinfoil hats" ~Gruber). Microsoft (and Apple) doesn't deserve better for their arrogant stance on this issue.
  - dpark 14y ago
    > Also, who is to say that $4bn/year isn't "fair" when video is an essential part of Microsofts products? Anyone who's sane. $4bn/year? That's nuts. It would be nuts even if that was the licensing fees for complete H.264 coverage. However, it's not complete coverage, because there are hundreds of patents in the H.264 pool. http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avc-att1.pdf http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avc-att1.p... It's not clear to me whether these two particular patents are in the pool or not. I assume not, because otherwise Microsoft would have a license for them through MPEG-LA already. However, given that Motorola was involved in the creation of H.264, it seems that their patent assertions here might be illegal. Some of Qualcomm's patents were apparently thrown out because they didn't disclose them properly and include them in the patent pool. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264#Patent_licensing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264#Patent_licensing
  - cube13 14y ago
    >It's not clear that Motorola didn't offer "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms" for licensing. Microsoft claims licensing would cost them $4bn/year; Motorola disputes this claim. It's not clear why Motorola should be able to do in the first place. If Motorola's patents cover encoding and decoding of H.264, those patents should be in MPEG LA's pool. However, Motorola is not listed as licensor on the website(http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Licensors.aspx http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Licensors.aspx ). Since the pool covers all the essential patents related to encoding and decoding H.264, why isn't Motorola included in the list?
astrodust 14y ago
If you think you can make a video codec that isn't encumbered by patents I've got a bridge I can sell you. It is impossible for WebM to be free from patent violations. In software, everything you do will run afoul of some patent you've never heard of that, in the opinion of the court, describes an aspect of what you've done. The huge problem with software patents is they describe in hand-wavy terms the "technology" without actually being specific enough mean anything. The patent for "embedding hypermedia documents" that stung Microsoft for several hundred million dollars is so uselessly vague it may as well have been pulled from a science fiction novel. Allowing a patent without a single line of source code or even proof of a working implementation is not helping anyone.

taligent 14y ago

You don't get it do you. EVERY company in the industry has now been given carte blanche to completely ignore FRAND principles and sue everyone after a standard has been adopted. This is the worst precedent to hit the industry in a long time.

pavanky 14y ago
I am a bit unaware of the situation, but didnt this lawsuit happen after MS sued Motorola over android ?
- shrikant 14y ago
  Yes indeed: http://www.mobiledia.com/news/104161.html http://www.mobiledia.com/news/104161.html Microsoft Wants to Ban Motorola Phones in U.S. "Motorola is infringing our patents and we are confident that the ITC will rule in our favor," said David Howard, Microsoft's deputy general counsel for litigation. "We are vigorously defending ourselves against Microsoft's patent attack business strategy," said Motorola in a responding statement. "We have also brought legal actions of our own in the U.S. and in Europe to address Microsoft's large scale of infringement of Motorola Mobility's patents." He who lives by the sword...
ZeroGravitas 14y ago
Not if it leads to patent-backed FRAND being abandoned for something better, like allowing standards to be freely implemented by anyone at no cost regardless of who claims patents on them and then standards committees can spend their time on engineering not lawyering, politics and FUD.
phoboslab 14y ago
It's not clear that Motorola didn't offer "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms" for licensing. Microsoft claims licensing would cost them $4bn/year; Motorola disputes this claim. Also, who is to say that $4bn/year isn't "fair" when video is an essential part of Microsofts products? Don't get me wrong, I hate patents as much as everyone else here, but I still think this lawsuit poses as a very nice example of why free video/audio codecs are important. We had the same shit with LZW/GIF patents a decade earlier and all the warnings were ignored and laughed at ("Nerds with tinfoil hats" ~Gruber). Microsoft (and Apple) doesn't deserve better for their arrogant stance on this issue.
- dpark 14y ago
  > Also, who is to say that $4bn/year isn't "fair" when video is an essential part of Microsofts products? Anyone who's sane. $4bn/year? That's nuts. It would be nuts even if that was the licensing fees for complete H.264 coverage. However, it's not complete coverage, because there are hundreds of patents in the H.264 pool. http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avc-att1.pdf http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avc-att1.p... It's not clear to me whether these two particular patents are in the pool or not. I assume not, because otherwise Microsoft would have a license for them through MPEG-LA already. However, given that Motorola was involved in the creation of H.264, it seems that their patent assertions here might be illegal. Some of Qualcomm's patents were apparently thrown out because they didn't disclose them properly and include them in the patent pool. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264#Patent_licensing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264#Patent_licensing
- cube13 14y ago
  >It's not clear that Motorola didn't offer "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms" for licensing. Microsoft claims licensing would cost them $4bn/year; Motorola disputes this claim. It's not clear why Motorola should be able to do in the first place. If Motorola's patents cover encoding and decoding of H.264, those patents should be in MPEG LA's pool. However, Motorola is not listed as licensor on the website(http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Licensors.aspx http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Licensors.aspx ). Since the pool covers all the essential patents related to encoding and decoding H.264, why isn't Motorola included in the list?

astrodust 14y ago

If you think you can make a video codec that isn't encumbered by patents I've got a bridge I can sell you. It is impossible for WebM to be free from patent violations. In software, everything you do will run afoul of some patent you've never heard of that, in the opinion of the court, describes an aspect of what you've done. The huge problem with software patents is they describe in hand-wavy terms the "technology" without actually being specific enough mean anything. The patent for "embedding hypermedia documents" that stung Microsoft for several hundred million dollars is so uselessly vague it may as well have been pulled from a science fiction novel. Allowing a patent without a single line of source code or even proof of a working implementation is not helping anyone.