8 ms·

Precisely the opposite. If MPEG-LA thought they had VP8 dead to rights, they would never have agreed to this deal -- they would have litigated to the bitter end

• wmf 14y ago
  Litigating to the bitter end is rarely rational. I can imagine a couple scenarios where this deal makes sense; e.g. if Google paid more than what a pool would have earned.
• anon1385 14y ago
  >It's always stunned me that the same community that hates on patent trolls is in love with H264 The same community that hates patent trolls continued to use gif and MP3 for many years, so I'm not sure why use of H264 would surprise you. And are people really 'in love' with it? All I see is people who prefer the clearly technically superior option. Not to mention the fact that many of us live in places where software patents are not relevant, and don't feel inclined to use inferior technology just because of the idiocies of the US legal system.
  • ZeroGravitas 14y ago
    H.264 is an inferior technology that only exists because of the idiocies of the US legal system. (MPEG-LA specifically asked the US gov if they could set up a patent cartel without being held to account for antitrust). See the excellent comment above by AnthonyMouse that explains the process. But since those "idiocies" have had their intended effect of squashing competition you don't know what you are missing. Its like everyone complaining about how bad other office suites are when MSFT controls the evolution of the .doc format and Windows. You'll only notice if we end up locked into using and paying for H.264 long after it stops being technically current.
    • anon1385 14y ago
      Yes these are all reasons that software development shouldn't be carried out in the USA at all. But in the real world it is and the US is a big market so it impacts the technologies available to me. None of that makes VP8 better than H.264 though. Back when the US authorities were trying to restrict exporting strong crypto, was the correct response to just use worse crypto, or was it to move crypto development outside the US and tell the US gov to go fuck themselves? I feel it was the latter, but I may be wrong.
    • jfb 14y ago
      H.264 is in no way an inferior technology, from a video compression point of view.
• taligent 14y ago
  Well this is an interesting way to look at it. Litigation is rarely a smart move for a licensing organisation. During the years wasted going back/forth during appeals etc the competitor has a price margin advantage which they can use to increase market share. It's not that easy to quantity that if damages are awarded. And seriously you either need to put up or STFU. If you have some prior art that invalidates specific patents then speak up. Plenty of companies would be very, very interested. But I'm going to take a guess that you don't.
  • nitrogen 14y ago
    It's the MPEG-LA who needed to put up or shut up, as you put it. Vague threats of assembling a patent pool, a threat that never materialized, are not evidence of infringement. I'm inclined to believe that the deal with Google this late in the game indicates that MPEG-LA didn't have a leg to stand on, as while they were negotiating with Google they could have gone after Mozilla or other VPx users.
    • wbillingsley 14y ago
      I think this story sounds like great news. MPEG LA's licensors include the research labs -- Fraunhofer, etc -- not your usual patent trolling companies. This gives the labs a sugar daddy (Google) that has a commercial interest in paying them for it their advances to be licensed to the public. Which is a nice release valve, because government budget squeezes means there's always more and more pressure for research labs to lock up their tech to earn money from commercialising it. Good on Google for doing this.
  • danbmil99 14y ago
    > And seriously you either need to put up or STFU. If you have some prior art that invalidates specific patents then speak up. Plenty of companies would be very, very interested. But I'm going to take a guess that you don't. To quote Seth Meyers -- Really? So you honestly believe that all the MPEG-LA patents are true innovations? Or just perhaps, having 100+ patents, an army of lawyers, and an FTC antitrust pass is intimidating enough to trump whether the patents are for the most part frankly crap. Not sure who I'm misquoting here, but in reality you can patent a ham sandwich.
• zdw 14y ago
  Ignoring the patent issues for a second... The reason why people tend to be fans of H.264 is that it has a wide range of hardware that can encode/decode and that hardware has been available for years. This saves greatly on power for embedded devices/phones/etc. While implementations of VP8 in hardware do exist, I'm not aware of it shipping in any sort of volume. Are there any modern Android phones that can do VP8 in hardware?
  • jcr 14y ago
    nVidia Tegra-3 ships in fairly massive volume. http://www.nvidia.com/object/tegra-3-processor.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/tegra-3-processor.html But your point still stands. Hardware support is still rare, and it's extremely beneficial, nearly required.
    • gillianseed 14y ago
      Going by the wikipedia page for webm, the following companies are implementing webm hardware support: amd, arm, broadcom, qualcomm, texas instruments, nvidia intel is considering hardware based acceleration for their atom based tv chips. Given that the vp8 hardware acceleration is free of licence costs, and given this patent agreement, I hope that we'll see much increased hardware support for it.
  • ZeroGravitas 14y ago
    This deal was done in the context of WebRTC, and getting VP8 made mandatory to implement. Basically none of the H.264 hardware is usable for this purpose. And x264 isnt tuned for this useccase, which makes VP8 the best codec for this purpose in basically every dimension. But don't expect the political oppostion to be silenced by that, as patents and technical excellence and hardware support and power efficiency were just convenient excuses that they can ignore if the facts change. edit: just noticed this covers VP9 too. Its probably too early to push for that as mandatory in WebRTC but there's nothing stopping Google using it for Chrome to Android chats, or anyone else picking it up.
    • kierank 14y ago
• nl 14y ago
  There is no such thing as "dead to rights" in a patent war over algorithms. It would come down to the jury, and it would be a gamble (as the disagreement amongst people who should know about whether VP8 infringes or not shows). The risk for MPEG-LA in not agreeing is that the patent pool would collapse - if Google isn't in then why should anyone else remain in the pool? I do agree that this agreement seems to be pretty good for Google though. Their ability to sub license VP8 has the potential to undermine royalties for H264 to the patent pool. BTW, MPEG-LA isn't a patent troll by any conventional definition. Firstly, MPEG-LA doesn't patent anything itself, they are merely an organisation to pool related patents amongst member organisations. Secondly, the member organisations are mostly (all?) the opposite of patent trolls, too: they hold patents in the field because they are actively producing software in the field. That is the opposite of the typical non-practising-entity patent troll model. Thirdly, if you do accept software patents then the patent pool model is actually quite a nice way to manage them. It means people who want to work in the field only have to deal with one entity and gain protection from patent claims from any other company in the field. (Note: I don't accept software patents at all - just pointing out that while they exist this isn't a bad way to do them). I have no real opinion on VP8 vs H264, but I do know that the patent situation is much more complex than you seem to believe.
  • AnthonyMouse 14y ago
    >The risk for MPEG-LA in not agreeing is that the patent pool would collapse - if Google isn't in then why should anyone else remain in the pool? I think you have it kind of backwards. This whole thing is inside baseball. Start with the patent system. It's really easy to get a narrow patent. It's far too easy to get an overly broad and totally obvious patent. It's really easy to get a narrow patent. So what happens when all the industry players come together to create a standard for a video codec? They all offer up their "technologies" for inclusion in the standard, because if it gets included and they have a patent then they get royalties. Some of these are the ridiculously overbroad and obvious patents everyone is accustomed to complaining about. But here's where the narrow patents come in: Narrower patents tend to be stronger. It's harder to find invalidating prior art if the claims are more specific. Plus, more is better, and narrow patents are easier to get. So what they do is they all file for specific patents on exactly what they intend to put in the standard, so that all the major industry players each have several strong patents that cover the standard they're creating. The incentive that they each have individually to do this is obvious, and the others allow it because they want to do it too and they implicitly expect reciprocity. It's basically a method for implicit collusion. They each include a bunch of patented stuff in the standard primarily for the purpose of increasing the amount of royalties they get from anyone who uses it. Since each of the major players does the same thing, the royalties between one another largely cancel out, but if there are any minor players or any new competitor attempts to enter the market, now they've got to pay a bunch of royalties to all the incumbents to use the standard whereas the incumbents don't have to pay any royalties to them because the newcomer wasn't around at the time to have put their patented technologies in the standard. It serves as a pretty effective method to thwart competition, and it's really hard for the antitrust authorities to prove anything illegal is going on. So enter Google/On2 and VP8. They don't like all this. "Promote competition in markets complementary to your own" is business 101. So they specifically design a codec that doesn't infringe the H.264 patents and release it free to the world. Obviously this means one less barrier to competition in those markets -- it's exactly the same strategy as giving away Android for free. You can't allow a cartel to form in a complementary market or eventually they'll find a way to lock up all your customers behind a toll booth and squeeze all the margins out of your market. This doesn't make MPEG-LA happy. They're in the toll booth business. If people start using VP8 or its successors then the whole antitrust-resistant implicit collusion scheme is going to fall apart. So they try to figure out how to stop it, but what can they do? When you sell hammers, you start seeing nails everywhere. So they threaten to create a patent pool for VP8. The point of the pool was never to actually license patents to people who wanted to use VP8. VP8 is somewhat worse than H.264 on account of having to avoid some of the ridiculously broad and obvious patents. If you have to license patents then you might as well just use H.264. Which was the real point of the pool for VP8. Make sure there doesn't exist a decent royalty-free codec so that people can't use it instead of H.264. But VP8 was specifically designed to avoid all known patents, so setting up a pool for it turns out to be harder than it sounds. On the other hand, software patents are so broken that you can generally find a few bad ones that maybe possibly read on any given thing, at least to the point that you can tie it up in litigation for years. So that's what I imagine happened here: MPEG-LA probably knew they wouldn't be able to win in the end, but they had the ability to cause trouble, which can be leveraged into a tidy settlement.
• GHFigs 14y ago
  Any accurate definition of "the video compression community" is going to include most of the licensors represented by MPEG-LA.
• tzs 14y ago
  > Precisely the opposite. If MPEG-LA thought they had VP8 dead to rights, they would never have agreed to this deal -- they would have litigated to the bitter end. Huh? Whether or not they had VP8 dead to rights, they would agree to a licensing deal. The MPEG-LA's purpose is to make licensing deals for the patents in their pools. They litigate when they cannot get an agreement for a licensing deal.
• chongli 14y ago
  >It's always stunned me that the same community that hates on patent trolls is in love with H264 There is no hypocrisy here; I am allowed to love technology while simultaneously hating the practices if its authors. I am allowed to benefit from the good produce of a bad regime. In no way does that compromise my argument for reform. Those who try to argue that reformers ought to boycott everything they disagree with are making a kind of appeal to hypocrisy; a logical fallacy.