DOJ Anti-trust Investigation of MPEG-LA 149
thomst writes "The Wall Street Journal's Thomas Catan reports that the Department of Justice has launched an anti-trust investigation of MPEG-LA's purported efforts to prevent Google's VP8 codec from widespread adoption. According to the article, the California Stare Attorney General's office is also investigating MPEG-LA for possible restraint of trade practices."
Settlers of Catan (Score:5, Funny)
When the parties come to a quiet settlement out of the public eye, I can't wait for Thomas Catan's headline: "Settlers of Catan"
So, let me get this straight... (Score:1)
The US Department of Justice is going after the International Oraganisation for Standardization (ISO)'s Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) Licensing Agency (LA)?
Am I the only person who sees a problem here?
Re:So, let me get this straight... (Score:5, Informative)
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The MPEG-LA is not actually affiliated with MPEG or ISO.
Well, that's what they say. It's easy to get a list of MPEG-LA members but not so easy for MPEG. How many MPEG-LA members aren't members of the MPEG committee?
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I actually don't think that there is that much connection.
I certainly know of MPEG participants who do not approve of MPEG-LA, and there are certainly also patents that the MPEG has to deal with, whether they want to or not.
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I certainly know of MPEG participants who do not approve of MPEG-LA,
That is unsurprising given that MPEG is larger than MPEG-LA (in terms of number of members) but absent a list of MPEG members it's difficult to make any kind of real comparison.
Re:So, let me get this straight... (Score:5, Insightful)
Trolls vs. practicing entities (Score:2)
basically they are a bunch of parasite lawyers living off software patents
But that still doesn't necessarily make them "trolls" in the sense of nonpracticing entities. A lot of MPEG-LA members sell copies of encoders that they have developed. I'd bet a lot of MPEG-LA members are also in MPEG itself.
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That said, trolls operate under a bunch of different business models and with a number of overlapping motivations, including the motivation of excluding or taxing small competitors who need to implement standards. Moreover, anyone who tries to create a patent pool that supposedly covers OGG, VP8 etc just as they are released as royalty-free totally deserves that description, if you ask me.
Re:Trolls vs. practicing entities (Score:4, Insightful)
No they are trolls, because every year they say how thankful we should be they decided not to charge us this year for the stuff they gave away for free last year.
Next year they will say the same thing. They have said it the last 2 years now that I know of. Oddly enough 2 years ago was when Google started dealing with VP8, and actually opening up those codecs.
Right now you have to pay to use H.264 every time you, encode, decode, stream, move, or look at the file. Only because MPEG-LA are such nice people they actually only charge you for encode, decode, and stream.
If you think your not paying, then you might want to take a closer look someone is paying it for you then raising the cost of doing business along the way.
And that aside (Score:3)
Something being international doesn't mean it is outside of the law of a given country. Heck for that matter most large companies are international, they have offices all over the world. That doesn't mean they get to say "You can't pass any laws on us or take us to court! We are International!" Do business in the US, you are subject to US law. Same deal with MS and EU anti-trust rulings.
However the parent is completely correct. MPEG is the group that designs compression formats and so on. MPEG-LA is a group
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Has nothing at all to do with the development of anything.
That is exceedingly kind, I'm fairly sure the patent holders in various ways try influencing the development to make their patents essential to the format. Formally the MPEG-LA has nothing to do with MPEG, but I'm sure many of the companies have both experts on the MPEG group and license income from MPEG-LA.
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LA == 'Licensing Agency'?
I always vaguely thought of Los Angeles (Hollyood) when I read that.
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Probably not but you should be.
At least where hightech is concerned this so called standards organizations have devolved into little more of substance than East Texan Patent trolls, they just hide behind their names and history for the sake of keeping a better face on it.
All MPEG-LA is really about is deciding who gets to play and who has to pay based on if you are lucky enough to be 1, a Mega Multinational, 2 part of their chosen boys club, and 3 friendly to their business interests. These organizations a
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Software Patent Absurdity (Score:5, Insightful)
The point of software patents was to protect innovation. This should be a clear example that it is not, as VP8's adoption is supposedly slow because of the risk of violating other patents whose owners won't come out of the woodwork until VP8 has enough market share to make a lawsuit nicely profitable. The whole thing is patently ridiculous.
The sheer amount of patent lawsuits and now that even Google and Apple are teaming up against a troll is very telling. Software patents are not serving their intended purpose and it is obvious because no one wants to adopt VP8 because of the unknown threat. This is the stifling of innovation and is not protecting the patents of the 10 companies that may own patents to VP8 because no one wants to use them so they just become dead weight. What good is an idea if it can't be used?
Software is a fickle thing. Your idea may have also been invented by someone and you just didn't patent it. This is the problem with software patents. The patents themselves can be very vague and cover a whole host of ideas. If the patent office has to pass more patents just to get rid of a backlog, perhaps it isn't the fault of the filers but the fault of the law.
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So the remaining technology - all the innovations that make h264 more advanced than MPEG2 - accou
Re:Software Patent Absurdity (Score:5, Insightful)
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If H264 wasn't covered by a bunch of expensive patents, VP8 would not be needed. People could put effort in improving H264 instead.
They are.
HEVC (aka H.265) should be ready in about a year or two.
Current indications are that the new standard could provide 2x better video compression performance (i.e. around half the bitrate for a similar quality level) at the expense of significantly higher computational complexity, compared with H.264/AVC.
High Efficiency Video Coding / HEVC / H.265 : Beyond H.264 [vcodex.com]
HEVC like H.264 is not a exclusively - or even primarily - a "web codec." The target markets include next generation HDTVs and services like Netflix and OnLive gaming.
Netflix doesn't need the PC.
It doesn't need the browser.
What it need is the content protection demanded by the major providers,
What it needs is placement of its "app" on very tablet and smartphone, Internet-enabl
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Unfortunately it is not as simple as that. The reason we have software patents is because lawyers were able to twist a series of patent cases into a questionable conclusion that says something like 'when this software idea is combined with the hardware of a computer it transforms the hardware into a new machine and therefore the software itself is patentable as part of the implementation.'
There are a number of people who make a great deal of money ensu
Re:Software Patent Absurdity (Score:5, Insightful)
You should be able to patent implementations, not ideas.
We already have protection for implementations, it's called copyright.
Now can someone in government put two and two together and see the absurd situation software patents has caused? VP8 is supposed to be patent-free but everyone on the H264 side is calling it patent-encumbered anyway.
I am personally opposed to software patents, especially for things like 1-click purchase, but you need to be able to see both sides of the issue. Look at it a different way:
VP8 was developed over the course of 10 years by a company called On2 Technologies. They paid their programmers lots of money, and got lots of money from investors to do so, because they thought they could make a lot of money in return. And they did. In 2004, for example, Macromedia paid them lots of money to license their VP6 codec. Now, to be interoperable, you need to let other people know what the format is, so if it weren't for patents, Macromedia wouldn't have needed to pay them. They could have just rewritten the codec on their own and avoided licensing costs.
If patents weren't around, On2 wouldn't have been able to get licensing fees. Thus they wouldn't have been able to make money, and they wouldn't have gotten funding to pay their programmers. It is arguably only because of patents that VP8 even exists today.
See how it is? Patents aren't a clear evil. Life is nuanced and there are shades of grey.
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Besides, as you said, On2 made a lot of money on their patents. How much money did they make from implementation and support of the software they wr
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You might want to read up on Jefferson [uchicago.edu]. Here is a relevant quote: "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible
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If patents weren't around, On2 wouldn't have been able to get licensing fees.
That's right, and that's because On2, like anyone who tries to monopolize math, does not deserve our business. Without software patents, an open codec(s) would be developed just as well by a hardware alliance in collaboration with the FLOSS community and the cost would be passed on to consumers of hardware devices. The total development costs would be an order of magnitude smaller and no one would have a monopoly on using a class of mathematical functions. Where is the freaking downside? I could run your ar
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Without software patents, an open codec(s) would be developed just as well by a hardware alliance in collaboration with the FLOSS community and the cost would be passed on to consumers of hardware devices
And it would suck, like the open source codecs that are already in existence.
Flawed logic to justify SW patents: FAIL (Score:2)
Since there is absolutely no way you could possibly verify this let alone 'know' this (unless you created an alternate reality where patents didn't exist and that only difference caused this one company to fail), your entire argument is predicated on something that is untestable.
But, it's a good thing we have patents, or
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You were saying there were 'shades of grey', and how even though you were against SWPatents, in general, that in some specific instance, it allowed developed of a subsequent product further down the line.
My take was that using the supposition that SWP enabled the further development was predicated on 1) the untestable presumption that SWP's were required for the development and payouts on the first product and 2) that the 2nd product wouldn't have been developed independently by the original developers in t
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It's possible this company could have made a profit without using software patents. Hard to know. William Rosen makes an argument [thedailyshow.com] that patents do drive invention and innovation. I don't have the breadth of knowledge to know if he is
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There's a very interesting paper [ssrn.com] that documents that extrinsic rewards (like profits) actually hinder the creative process in some areas. The paper documents the origins of the copyright/patent system as being a replacement for an earlier system where 'patents' were given as 'rewards' by monarchy, based on 'favoritism' rather than on anything to do with creativity -- somewhat akin to the modern day 'knighthood's being granted as a reward by monarchy to some individuals who 'please the monarchy' (in these d
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The paper affirms that in some industries, patents are very important in protecting profit, while in others, it doesn't. This is not surprising. I wouldn't disagree that most software patents I've read are obvious (though sometimes profitable for their authors). These are certainly going to stifle innovation. But even in the computer industry, some companies, like Qualcomm, are motivated by patents and profits. Maybe their technologies woul
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That'd be cool, but not quite so clear in my writing...
As for qualcomm -- while it does make real products, it has quite a few patents that it hasn't used itself or allowed to be licensed. It's these 'dormant' patents that are a problem. Qualcomm's practices haven't left others wondering if they are starting to move more towards being a patent troll.
I've no prob with inventors getting paid for their inventions, but if they create 'patents'
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Be still my heart ! (Score:1)
I thought that the DOJ anti-trust division had all been frozen in carbonite. Now, it appears that they are awake and may actually do some good. When they are done with this, there is a certain search engine they might want to look at...
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Patents were designed to be monopolistic (Score:2)
In Cohoots with the government (Score:3)
I told you Google was working with the government! This just proves it.
--- Glenn Beck
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It just seems that as soon as the name Glenn Beck is mentioned on slashdot, some 'dotters shit their pants in an unholy crusade against him, without entertaining the notion that the whole thing may just be one finely done parody.
Steve Jobs on video codecs and patents (Score:5, Insightful)
This seems like a reasonable statement, at first, but then I wondered what makes video codecs so special. I mean, why single them out, when almost anything has at least the possibility of infringing on a patent? I think that's pretty much the point of having a patent pool, these days. If someone claims that you're infringing on their patents, you can search through your collection of thousands of patents, in order to find something that they are infringing upon.
Now, I'm not necessarily an anarchist wanting to abolish intellectual property, but I do believe that patents have become an embarrassing travesty, thanks to the past fifteen or twenty years' worth of crappy patents (which are just now beginning to fall out of protection). When you can't even write an open video codec without industry insiders calling into question your very algorithms, there's something wrong, be it with the insiders (spreading FUD in order to kill the competition) or the laws (which have made competition impossible).
Anyways, I'm sure a hundred other people will say the same thing, since this is Slashdot, and we looove to complain about intellectual property laws, so I'll add a little something extra: what I've thought about as a replacement for our current system. How's this sound?
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Here's my patent reform plan:
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That doesn't work even if it's actually a reasonable patent. What if the research cost is $50000, but the research only has a 5% chance of producing something useful and the company had to do twenty such research projects in order to get one patent? Certainly not every anti-cancer research project is going to produce a cure for cancer, after all--a lot of them won't pan out.
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I like your idea, but 110% is awfully low. Patents really do need to allow for a reasonable profit. Let's set it at 200%, so you double your investment. That is pretty fair.
Better yet, I'd like to include a clause that lets a third party assert that the patent has paid for itself. At such a time a court would examine the situation in a trial-like fashion and if it found that the patent had generated a gross profit of some reasonable multiple of its registered cost--say ten times as much--then the patent be
You left out profit motive (Score:2)
I'm not fan of the current patent system, but they're not just about protecting the money spent developing the patented concept but the profit that can be obtained from exclusive access to it.
The money invested in developing a patentable idea is just that, for the most part -- a business investment. People with money to invest are looking for some kind of return on their investment -- not just the money they invested, but MORE than they invested, an interest percentage.
I like your idea, but you would have
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"Second, let's remove all the legalese and obfuscation from the applications. If it's not clear and concise, reject it. If it doesn't narrow down the scope to laser precision, reject it. If it sounds like a lawyer wrote it, rather than an engineer, reject it. The default action should generally be to reject, seeing as patent are supposed to be novel."
They are clear and concise to a lawyer.
What it all comes down to is that writing any legal document is a lot like making a wish in DnD.
To give you an example.
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Nitpicking is the soul of law(suits). Welcome to life!
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Yes just like when you make a wish in DnD.
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As long as we can make arbitrary changes to patent law, I think the most valuable thing you could do is to mandate a periodic investigation into whether or not the current policies encourage innovation. Are algorithm patents slowing down innovation? Shorten their duration by a few years/be stricter about what you accept.
I can only imagine the punishment y
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First, let's upgrade the patent clerks to "patent engineers", because that's what they should be, with appropriate qualifications and salary.
Next thing, you're going to be saying that some well-qualified patent examiner [wikipedia.org] might be capable of producing top-notch research in physics or something!
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The patent process now involves wrestling with a live bear. Anyone who successfully survives the experience is awarded the patent.
Are you a big fan of PLIF [courageunfettered.com]?
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Oh, definitely! I'm glad someone caught the reference.
Engineer / Lawyers (Score:2)
First, let's upgrade the patent clerks to "patent engineers", because that's what they should be, with appropriate qualifications and salary.
Don't know about patent clerks. But I understand that patent lawyers are already required to also be engineers. Have been for some time.
Finally! (Score:2)
It's about time the Justice Dept. gave value for money [google.com].
Absolutely! (Score:5, Funny)
..in addition to MPEG-LA (Los Angeles).
Sounds like a step in the right direction (Score:2)
Important Standards need IP Certainty (Score:3)
[this is my personal viewpoint]
I'm all for people making money on their intellectual property (IP). And every modern standards development organization (SDO) requires the disclosure of IP by standards setting participants.
But it is the IP held by non-participants unknowingly infringed upon by standards that are the big cause of FUD on the adoption of new standards.
ANSI is the the official U.S. representative to ISO/IEC and accreditor of US SDOs . Not all US standards become ANSI "National Standards", but many important ones do.
I believe that upon ANSI elevating a standard from one of its accredited SDOs to a National Standard, there should be a legally defined process that begins a time period wherein all IP owners must "put up or shut up" regarding the standard, i.e. they must declare whether their IP is potentially infringed by a National Standard.
After that time window is over, patent or other IP infringement cases can not be brought for the use of that IP in applications of that National Standard.
I'd be happy for that window to be 1 year or 2 years to ensure that IP holders have enough time to be able to monitor publication of National Standards and properly analyze them, but no more than that.
I'm not a WIPO or international law expert, but it might be nice to extend this to at least a certain class of ISO/IEC standards as well (but perhaps only the important ones).
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By the way, in case I wasn't clear, I meant a 1-2 year time window for IP holders to "declare" their IP is in a standard. Standard users would still have to negotiate for licenses of declared IP, but at least they would know who to negotiate with, as opposed to the current situation where no one really knows what IP might be infringed upon by a standard.
Glad (Score:2)
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I agree, in this case they should have gone straight for the root cause, Microsoft and Apple.
Their attempt at strangling VP8 by trying to build a pool of patent to sue the one owning it are by far the worst case of anticompetitive behavior i have seen since the browser wars.
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I agree, in this case they should have gone straight for the root cause, Microsoft and Apple.
Microsoft and Apple are two of the largest members of the MPEG-LA. They are the two best-known by the public. Going after MPEG-LA very much is going after Microsoft and Apple, but it's also going after all the other criminals involved in this extortion racket at the same time. I consider that to be positive.
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Hmm... The two best-known? I think the following companies would like to argue that point:
Cisco Systems
Dolby Laboratories Licensing Corporation
Fujitsu Limited
Hewlett-Packard Company
Hitachi, Ltd.
Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V.
LG Electronics Inc.
Mitsubishi Electric Corporation
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation
Panasonic Corporation
Robert Bosch GmbH*
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.
Sharp Corporation
Siemens AG
Sony Corporation
Toshiba Corporation
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Most people have no idea what most of those companies make... Sony is right up there too, but these days they definitely lack the cachet of Apple. Hilarious!
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Most people have no idea what most of those companies make
Dolby has something to do with movies: see "Dolby Digital" that used to be shown before movies back when it was new. LG, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, and (as you mentioned) Sony are familiar from the TV aisle at Best Buy or Walmart.
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I don't know. My Bosch cordless drill is pretty nifty and Siemens makes everything from phones to trains.
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And babies. Wait, that's not right.
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Nippon is Japan's AT&T.
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You can answer "TVs" for most of those and people recognize TV brands, if for no other reason, because they look at TVs all the time, and they all have a brand label.
NONE of those brands just make TVs. There are a jillion manufacturers of televisions so just another TV manufacturer is nobody. If you think of Sharp (or worse yet, Mitsubishi) as a company that makes TVs, then you DON'T know what they do.
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And if they truly believe that, their free to sue Google and/or all users of VP8 for patent infringement. What they're not allowed to do (and what spurred this investigation) is to spread FUD about patent infringement without filing any sort of lawsuit in and effort to prevent adoption of a competitors product without the requirement of actually proving infringement. Believe it or not, you probably don't know more about monopoly law than the DOJ.
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>>>What they're not allowed to do (and what spurred this investigation) is to spread FUD about patent infringement
Really???
Which law prevent a corporation from doing that? Quote it to me.
Please and thank you.
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Companies usually doesn't mention competing products in a denigrating way for a reason and it's called lawsuit.
So, please provide a link to a car commercial doing this or stop posting please.
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We don't live in a system where everything must be a law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law [wikipedia.org]
For something like this, you're almost certainly looking for case law and legal precedent.
Sorry, I cannot quote such a source for you, as IANAL.
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Of all the abusive monopolies they choose to go after, this is who they pick?
They've got to start small and work their way up (one can hope). After all, they're really out of practice - the big cartels and abusive monpopolies would eat the DoJ for breakfast.
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It's hard to think of a more clear cut example of supposed business rivals getting together to agree and enforce a common price.
Price fixing is a time honored practice in many industries. oil, steel, railroads, airlines and communications, all run by pirates who do challenge each other for top position, like in any other herd or flock of animals, but will never work against the whole..
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Except there is no price being discussed. The article sums it up nicely at the end:
If MPEG-LA believes that VP8 infringes, then they are well within their rights to question it. The OpenSource folks, of which slashdot has a majority, seem to think that all patents are evil. I tend to think both sides have merit, and neither
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But I'm not a lawyer and US justice system seems to do more to cover corporate executives (knowingly) illegal activities than to ensure justice overall. It 2008 financial crisis fiasco does not show that clearly than I don't know what is.
To nit pick, we don't have a justice system. We have a legal system. An analogy might be like learning the subtle difference between amoral and immoral. I agree with you fully.
Re:yea! (Score:5, Insightful)
Missing the point. This is an anti-trust suit. A trust is when companies that should be competing conspire for monopolistic powers/purposes. If individual patent holders were behaving in a free-market way, they would each challenge individually, giving google the ability to pick and choose which patents to license or give royalties to, should anyone actually have an unexpired patent that pertains. Google would also have to option of altering VP8 to not infringe on any patents held by people who were asking too high a price. Doing so would require knowing the price.
Instead, we have the formation of a cartel that plans to bundle all patents together so the holders are no longer competing, but form an illegal trust. Granted it is probably a toothless one without any actual infringed patents -- but whether or not they actually have any goods is still unknown, so it doesn't matter -- the legal situation must be treated as if they do in fact have infringing patents, since it is their express purpose to gather them.
in the meantime they are using the prospect of this bloc of patent holders as a basis to go out and make declarative public statements before actually producing any evidence that they actually have any patents that were infringed. As they have done such, they may be already guilty of anti-trust behavior, because they have utilized the common asset of their bluff.
Re:yea! (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, companies are free to implement h.264 WITHOUT involving the MPEG-LA. It's just that the company is now responsible for dealing with licensing the 1000+ patents from everyone themselves.
All the MPEG-LA does is provide a generic license of "Pay us $X per device and you'll be licensed to use all these patents". You are free to go after each and every patent holder separately.
Of course, there are advantages to going with MPEG-LA than doing it yourself, notably, dealing with 1000+ legal agreements is pretty difficult and time-consuming, and there's no guarantee that you can get it cheaper. Also, if you're dealing with one of your major competitors, they could simply deny you a license, or charge extra for it (MPEG-LA licensing is RAND).
Of course, I don't know what the MPEG-LA licenses are like, but they could also include clauses that say the license is only valid for h.264, and other codecs using the same things (VP8 is supposed to allow use of the same blocks has h.264) could very well require extra licensing because that block's license terms only cover h.264, not VP8, h.265, SuperCoolCodec, or whatever. This is less about the software decoders, but the hardware accellerators you'll need for VP8 to be used in mobile devices.
End result could very well be that you're paying for an h.264 license in order to do hardware accellerated VP8 decode.
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Exactly. That is the entire benefit of a patent pool so they don't have to deal with every legal patent, but rather get a blank package.
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You didn't reply to skids' point at all. Nobody is claiming that h264, its patent pool, or its licensing method is a problem here. What they are complaining about is that MPEG-LA basically said "Hey everybody, our current pool is insufficient, so send us other possible VP8-related patents and we'll all collude to take down this new competitor." They also announced this in a very public way to generate a FUD effect.
There's a difference between operating as a patent pool to enable interoperability and simp
Re:yea! (Score:4, Informative)
If MPEG-LA believes that VP8 infringes, then they are well within their rights to question it.
I don't think that's the issue. It isn't that if someone has a patent that reads on VP8 they aren't allowed to enforce it. It's that the people who control the rights to VP8's primary competitor are trying to gain control over rights to VP8.
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The OpenSource folks, of which slashdot has a majority, seem to think that all patents are evil.
I think you're misstating the issue. Some /.ers may think all patents are evil. A great many more /.ers think that a patent regime that allows software patents is misguided, because such patents are easily abused. The fact that many large software vendors own patents purely for defensive purposes only proves that, as of 2011, it takes a lot of money even to enter the software industry, let alone to thrive.
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