Nero Files Antitrust Complaint Against MPEG-LA 247
hkmwbz writes "German technology company Nero AG has filed an antitrust complaint against the MPEG-LA, the company that manages the H.264 patent pool. Nero claims that the MPEG-LA has violated the law and achieved and abused 100% market share, by, among other things, using 'independent experts' that weren't independent after all, not weeding out non-essential patents from the pool (in fact, it has grown from the original 53 to more than 1,000), and retroactively changing previously-agreed-on license terms."
About time. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:MPEG_LA Isn't the devil (Score:5, Insightful)
Any non-zero fee is bad for free (as in beer, and as in speech) software. When you have no price you're charging, then you can't really add in any fee on top of your price.
It basically means that if you want to distribute software, you have to implement a means to SELL it. If you goal is to distribute software free of charge, then even a $0.01 licensing fee totally cripples that.
A better solution for "free as in beer" software would be to make the fee a percentage of the sale price, though that still is somewhat problematic from the "free as in speech" angle.
Re:About time. (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. MPEG-LA is a glorified protection racket - any corp. brave enough to take a stand against it (and the myriad of other companies it 'shields') is worth standing behind
Re:MPEG_LA Isn't the devil (Score:3, Insightful)
Nope it is pure evil. Okay not pure evil but just your normal unrestricted greed.
Software patents are just evil.
Re:MPEG_LA Isn't the devil (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention their patents become so broad that if you want to create your own compressed video standard you still have to license it out.
Really, they should license certain software for $2 and if you use clean-room reverse engineering, you should be perfectly entitled to distribute and use it. And if you make a different standard, you should be able to distribute and use that without fear of patent lawsuits.
Any company that does not make use of their patent "portfolio" to advance art and sciences is an abuser of patent laws plain and simple.
Re:MPEG_LA Isn't the devil (Score:5, Insightful)
There are numerous other terms attached to MPEG licening, including requirements that you not facilitate the infringement of copyrights, your device respects HDCP, etc, etc. You either do as they say and pay their fee or they sue you. Sounds like extortion to me.
Re:MPEG_LA Isn't the devil (Score:1, Insightful)
There's always somebody gaming the system.
Re:MPEG_LA Isn't the devil (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if it is technically legal, I can't support it. I probably can't help supporting it financially (as so many products have it included) but I certainly can't support it morally.
The entire point of patents are to instruct how something works and how to make it. However, these patents are too broad and cover far too much.
Patents are supposed to encourage different ways of doing things, however, with "patent pools" like MPEG-LA and large corporations having far to many patents and lawyers plus patent trolls, you can't do anything without running into one of them.
If you don't do things exactly like the patent papers say and make non-trivial modifications, you should be able to use it. That is the only way in this day and age that patents can "promote the sciences and the useful arts"
Re:I didn't know Nero AG had time for this (Score:4, Insightful)
There are other completely free products that have matched Nero's (former) minimalist approach.
I don't disagree and would add in CDex as another example, but Nero is one of the few for profit companies that seem to have made an effort to put out a good product at a fair price. There's always been a few companies whose PC products are reasonably priced and worth the cost. Norton Utilities was perhaps the most shining example. I almost always get a free light version of Nero software when I buy a high end optical drive or a TV card/ripper. I'll pick up their latest full suite when it pops up on my radar screen at half price because the lite version still measures up well against the free stuff. One of the biggest problems vendors like Nero face is that MS knows it has to keep adding brain candy apps for the point and click crowd and MS will drive niche vendors out of business to keep their OS/Office products afloat. It's just a temporary bother because an OS in 10 years time will come with a full suite of audio video scrapbook apps for mom and pop and the kids to play with.
just my loose change
Re:pick your sides (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I didn't know Nero AG had time for this (Score:0, Insightful)
Bloatware is all that's left.
In other words, payware with little value. Which of course will get fewer and fewer sales. And that explains why Nero AG needs to start selling something else without delay. What to sell? It is reasonable for a company that has quite a bit of knowledge in the CD/DVD area to jump to the next big thing in a related technology; they seem to have chosen video and in mid-jump, slammed into the brickwall of MPEG-LA.
Re:MPEG_LA Isn't the devil (Score:5, Insightful)
If Vinny and Guido show up at your business with a baseball bat and remark that you have really unbroken knees, and it would be a shame if anything happened to them, it doesn't really matter if they demand $2 or $50. Once they show up at your business, willing to make threats about how they need a cut of the sales of a business that they may not have contributed anything to, they have gone too far. MPEG-LA are, at this point, basically operating under exactly the same business model as Mafia running a protection racket. They just invested enough in politics to make their game somehow legal.
Re:MPEG_LA Isn't the devil (Score:4, Insightful)
If you don't do things exactly like the patent papers say and make non-trivial modifications, you should be able to use it. That is the only way in this day and age that patents can "promote the sciences and the useful arts"
There's no such thing as "exactly" with software patents. Most of them are so broad and hopeless, they claim ideas, not specific implementations. Most software patents do not state and present any actual software that is being patented - i.e. no code, and no algorithm. In fact, it wouldn't make sense for them to list any actual code to patent because copyright already gives them a far greater protection than patents would.
Software patents don't make sense.
Re:I didn't know Nero AG had time for this (Score:5, Insightful)
Zomg, what will the pirates do if they can't burn DVDs??
OK, for real though, here's the other side of the debate.
Higher end tech is too expensive - BD-ROM is the current highest end consumers can buy, but the entrance cost to using that technology is sufficiently high that Joe Middle Class Consumer with his wife and 2.5 kids and a mortgage can't afford it.
Why buy a BD-R or flash drive when you only have 1 GB of photos to give to Aunt Mabel, anyway? A blank DVD only costs a few cents.
Burning CDs to listen in your car is cheaper than buying an mp3 player. Those are still a luxury item, especially with the outrageous cost of the kits you have to use to hook them up to your car. (Let's face it - I'm not going to buy a luxury car just because it plays mp3s.) Hitting the next track button on your stereo is safer than fiddling with your handheld mp3 player, too.
CD/DVD-ROM discs will outlast a frequently-used USB drive. I've had some Flash devices that lasted, some that didn't make it 2 years.
In the business world, $100,000+ software is still distributed on CD and DVD, or an image thereof. Drivers for certain brands of servers are downloaded as ISO format, so you are supposed to burn them. Firmware drivers come in bootable ISO form now. Yes, I know, 7-zip can unpack all of the above. But when you're setting up an OS on a new server or zeroing a disk or recovering a failed machine, you usually need a disc because they DON'T boot off the USB ports.
USB drives cannot normally be write-protected without arcane magik tricks, and not many can be write-protected at all. Read-only media is more secure when you're up against malware. This is important when performing security breach remediation, such as antivirus on a live system.
And now, for Slashdot brownie points: Linux installs are available as CD/DVD ISO images. ;) Of course you could use USB for this, but when you can give someone Linux for essentially free (CDs are dirt cheap) how could you go wrong there?
I've seen people using floppies and tapes as recently as last year. So, just because something's obsolete on the cutting edge, doesn't mean hordes of people aren't still using it.
Must be nice to have the money and time and modern hardware to get rid of optical media!! :)
Re:What timing! (Score:3, Insightful)
In other news, it couldn't have come at a better time for the American citizen and consumer.
Re:About time. (Score:4, Insightful)
...there is a BIG difference between real hardware patents and the mess that is software patents.
People keep saying this, but it is a semantic argument more than anything else.
The reality is that the patent system is so systemically broken due to its lack of scalability, that the effects are most heavily felt by the fastest growing/moving industries.
Patents have always been there to describe both processes and physical manifestations, so there's nothing new there. However, the term lengths and acceptance of obvious ideas are too far removed from what could be considered sane in the current technological climate.
Concepts such as:
1. 'future' patents, or patenting the 'goal' instead of the steps to get there.
2. being allowed to patent something that has already been published (for up to 12 months)
3. obvious 'innovations' (eg. $prior_art$ on the internet)
4. non-immediate disclosure of the patent at the time of submission (eg. submarine patents - disclosure that occurs after numerous other parties have 'innovated' along the same line.)
5. an incredibly low bar for novelty (eg. 'inventive' steps that are a natural evolution of the state of the art and will be discovered in short order (if they haven't been already) by multiple independent parallel 'inventors')
6. etc, etc.
The above are unsustainable in an industry where the half life of a product is under 3 years and the shear volume of 'inventors and implementors' number in the millions. As the number of players grows, the bar for acceptability must be raised proportionally. There is still room for patents on ideas that are truly clever and novel and would have little chance of being 'rediscovered' by multiple other parties without significant effort, investment and/or serendipity. But, the more players there are, the more likelihood that what is being claimed is far from being unique. (To quantise this, term lengths could be made relative to how inventive the patent actually is. More inventiveness, longer protection. Very little inventiveness, very short term length. However, measuring 'inventiveness' is probably just as difficult a question.)
In addition to fixing the above, it should also be recognised that anything that ends up being deemed an industry standard should be considered a special case and handled by the public trust.
'Fixing' the patent system by trying to create a disconnection between software/hardware/manufacturing processes/business processes/etc is not the right way to go about it. Even if a distinction can be made, it is so arbitrary as to end up flip/flopping every time a clever legal argument is made or sneaky 'word-around' starts getting written into new patents. (eg. "A device that ..." or "A method to create ...")
So, the answer is not to "deny all 'software' patents". The answer is FIX the system. Now.
Re:MPEG_LA Isn't the devil (Score:3, Insightful)
How much does Sourceforge charge for every disk downloaded from a free software bundle?
Re:MPEG_LA Isn't the devil (Score:2, Insightful)
Truly you were really a professional film maker, you'd have the money to pay them what they want. Why do you hate success?
Re:About time. (Score:4, Insightful)
I would think that if MPEG-LA has 'retroactively changing previously-agreed-on license terms' that in doing so they may have turned Nero from an abiding Licensee to a 'non-abider' rather quickly, and that perhaps this was what Nero was upset about.
I should RTFA, and all that though...
Re:About time. (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless that was in their original contract--that MPEG-LA could change the terms of the agreement at any time and demand retroactive payments as a result--I don't see how it could possibly be legal.
And if MPEG-LA licenses contain clauses that leave the door open for sudden, retroactive royalty assessment, then H.264 cannot die a quick enough death, and take MPEG-LA with it.
Re:About time. (Score:3, Insightful)
Even with that in the contract, I fail to see how a "we may change these terms at any time and make them retroactive" isn't the very definition of "unconscionable", and thus unenforceable.
Re:About time. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, I would think so, too. But contracts between corporations never have to be the least bit sane, apparently.