Good. This will hopefully force the matter and get all the patent claims out in the open. I doubt that actual holders of patents will play their cards close to their chests here because the upside of the cut of the bundle license for their patents through MPEG LA will be so large.
While I wish you couldn't patent software or algorithms we cannot ignore the fact that you can by simply willful ignorance and wishing that the patents go away if we just not think about them.
At the end of this process the thread from submarine patens will be vastly reduced and hardware manufacturers and companies like MS and Apple have a realistic road to supporting VP8.
IMO it doesn't matter whether VP8 costs one cent or one dollar; if you've already paid for H.264 then even one cent for VP8 is a waste of money. And those who aren't willing to pay (Mozilla and Opera) are not even willing to pay one cent.
Historically every new codec has been cheaper (despite containing more technology), so I expect VP8 to be cheaper than H.264, but H.265 may be cheaper still.
This is great. It will limit FUD. MPEGLA have called, and people need to show their cards. If we hear nothing, then that shows that the MPEGLA doesn't know of any patents that affect WebM/VP8, and they can stop all this "don't use VP8 cause of patents!" FUD.
If however there are patents on WebM/VP8, we can get them out in the open and look at them and then see.
The MPEG LA will most likely look at a ton of patent claims on WebM in the next 5 weeks, accept any with even a tenuous grasp on reality as legitimate, count how many they have, and announce a number of infringements essential to WebM. They will then file a number of lawsuits in a shotgun fashion, perhaps a few hundred, half of which will be against Google, and the other half against various companies using WebM; these will serve to gain royalties in settlements (minor gain) and discourage adoption of WebM (major gain). The suits against Google and whichever minor players don't settle will be appealed by the losing party and drag on for years.
This isn't the end of the FUD, or even the beginning of the end, but it is perhaps the end of the beginning.
> They will then file a number of lawsuits in a shotgun fashion, perhaps a few hundred, half of which will be against Google, and the other half against various companies using WebM
And then we'll finally get to see what Google has up their sleeve, because they're not dumb and surely saw this coming.
Maybe there will be a counter-suit, because h.264 violates some of Google's patents.
Could the MPEG-LA be sued if Google has patents that cover h.264? I'm not sure it could and if so we'd see a divergence between the interests of the MPEG-LA (who need to maintain control) and the groups contributing patents to them (who are afraid of a patent war).
I believe the MPEG-LA has a patent pool, where all companies that have patents on it pool them together. They don't sue anyone who's in the pool and they aren't sued by anyone in that pool.
If this is the case, then google could sue MPEG-LA users, but they might get sued themselves.
They will then file a number of lawsuits in a shotgun fashion, perhaps a few hundred, half of which will be against Google, and the other half against various companies using WebM
More likely, they will announce licensing terms and ask for everyone using WebM to acquire a license and pay royalties. Then, after a window of time, they will go after companies that don't license the patents.
So is this being driven by people working on the VP8 codec or the WebM project? Or is MPEG LA just trying to show that VP8 really is just a patent encumbered at h.264(and protect/add to their revenue stream?)
Since google's adoption relies heavily on their claim that WebM isn't patent encumbered, it's a pretty safe bet that this is being done by the h.264 patent holders for competitive reasons.
Given that this is a press release from MPEG-LA hosted on its own website stating that MPEG-LA is asking for information about possible WebM infringements, I assume it's being driven by MPEG-LA.
1. Does this mean that MPEG-LA has concluded it has no existing patents in the H.264 pool that are essential to what VP8 does? If they did, wouldn't those be the seeds of this new pool? Or maybe even obviate the need for a new pool?
2. Does Google have anything in its royalty free patent grant that says "If you sue us or otherwise challenge our VP8 IP, you can't get a free license from us"? If so, wouldn't that kill any possibility of a successful MPEG-LA pool? Who would license some percentage from MPEG-LA knowing they couldn't get a license for the rest from Google.
3. Couldn't Google just buy who ever steps up and says "I have essential patents"?
Does this mean that MPEG-LA has concluded it has no existing patents in the H.264 pool that are essential to what VP8 does?
Rather than reading tens of thousands of claims to find ones that apply to VP8, MPEG LA has outsourced that work to the patent holders themselves. If you want your patent to be included in the VP8 pool, you have to speak up.
If they did, wouldn't those be the seeds of this new pool?
Yes, I would expect that the VP8 pool will basically be a subset of the H.264 pool.
Who would license some percentage from MPEG-LA knowing they couldn't get a license for the rest from Google.
Google could get in antitrust trouble for refusal to license VP8 patents after claiming that VP8 is "open".
Couldn't Google just buy who ever steps up and says "I have essential patents"?
Just because you want WebM to not infringe and to succeed, that doesn't make any possible facts or remarks that potentially conflict with that wish FUD.
My point is that just because MPEGLA contains a pool of patents that they have deemed applies to WebM, doesn't mean those patents will hold up in a court of law, but it will certainly make for an excellent scare tactic against those who wish to utilize WebM in their projects. Before now, it was just vague remarks about how WebM may not be patent free, but after this:
"We have X number of patents in our pool that we say WebM infringes on; pay us and we won't sue you." It'll practically negate the entire purpose of using WebM instead of H.264.
Edit: Until a court of law has ruled that WebM infringes on patents held by MPEGLA, what they're doing is quite literally the definition of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. They want you to Fear a lawsuit, because you're Uncertain about the legitimacy of their claims, and Doubt that you could either afford the costs or even defeat their claims. You can't possibly tell me that FUD is inappropriate for this situation.
WebM exists at all because Google has tried to create FUD with H264. Fear royalties going up by some crazy amount, because you're uncertain what this well-established organization (MPEGLA) will do, and doubt that you can afford the costs of crazy royalty fees in 2016.
This despite the fact that MPEGLA has been licensing for ubiquitous technologies like MPEG-2 for over a decade.
Or perhaps people just don't want to have to pay a central licensing entity to use a video codec? I'm sure Google stands to save a lot of licensing fees if they don't have to pay into MPEGLA's patent pool. It has nothing to do with FUD and everything to do with wanting an unencumbered format.
Edit: This is the same reason that most video games these days use Ogg Vorbis for their music and sounds, because they save a lot of costs by using an unencumbered audio format.
It's now at least $6.5 Million a year, for another 20 year so the maths isn't that bad. Particularly if it prompts H.265 and any other future codec to be royalty free. I guess the idea is to spur on web video and make money from that though.
This is the same reason that most video games these days use Ogg Vorbis for their music and sounds, because they save a lot of costs by using an unencumbered audio format.
Are you sure about that? I'm sure a lot do, but I think a lot use WMA on Windows and XBox. I believe the encoder and decoder are free for use when developing games for those platforms. I think a different codec is then used for PS3 and Wii. I've certainly seen Vorbis used, but I think WMA is still used a fair bit more. I'd love to see evidence either way though.
You are correct on consoles, as those are generally restricted by the manufacturer to using codecs that are burned into the hardware. But almost all of the latest PC games that I have played are using Ogg Vorbis for the audio.
Can you provide a source for the video games fact you quote? I would think that most games license engines/SDKs that already support/license MP3 and its included in their upfront toolchain cost, meaning they pay for it whether or not they use it.
The MPEG 2 patent fees accounted for a "crazy amount" of the price of a DVD player as prices fell, which caused Chinese manufacturers to revolt and threaten to create their own rival standard. It costs $20 to add MPEG2 handling capability to Quicktime.
The MPEG4 part 2 and AAC fees were such a "crazy amount" that Apple (!) refused to release Quicktime 6 as a result until the fee structure was changed.
Expecting the owner of IP to extract maximum value from it is hardly a conspiracy theory.
I was fearful and uncertain about webM when I first read the analysis of the spec from "Diary of a x264 developer". Well before a lot of this fighting began. The fear, uncertainty and doubt comes from no real answer about anything. If this generates an answer by having Google fight whatever patent claims turn up in court (or a pool created for webM), we might actually get a hard answer in some form of official legal document. It may not be the answer we all want, but I have a hard time putting all my faith in a spec that was originally created in the dark, bought, opened, having the owner not submit it for standardization and basically tell you that you're on your own if you decide to use it and get sued.
I'm sure MPEG-LA wants it's money by creating a pool for webM, but I see this as maybe removing the FUD by forcing Google to defend webM and hopefully knock down any patent claims submitted.
I'm neutral on patents* but this is probably the best environment for patents in the entire world. MPEGLA is a licensing agency, so there are no personal or political issues. They make money by increasing the number of licensees. Those who submit patents to them ofload a lot of work that they otherwise would have to engage in for marketing the patents.
Finally the patent pools allow for standards to be created and propagated under fair terms. Fierce competitors like Microsoft and Apple can participate together and have an incentive to contribute patents to the pool.
And as was otherwise mentioned the existence of the pool mitigates risk that there might be a patent you don't know about.
Everybody who participates in the pool wins, and the pool is a much more efficient mechanism of licensing patents than doing it one by one in an environment of uncertainty, or doing it at the end of a long litigation that you have lost and are thus pushed over the barrel.
Further, I don't understand why the risk of patents for VP8 is called FUD. I'm certain a good chunk of the patents in the current MPEGLA pool cover VP8 because of the nature of patents (they have to be broadly written) the nature of our patent system (things have to be patented, because even if you invented it, someone else can patent it if you don't) and the nature of video encoding (you're essentially forced by the nature of video and the desire to compress to recognize features of images that exist in multiple frames and then encode based on them, this is an essential component of MPEG-4 video & h.264, and unless a fundamental patent for this has expired, and all derivative improvements have also expired, which I doubt, h.264 patents are going to cover VP8 encoding, unless VP8 somehow does not use any feature extraction.)
Thus, MPEGLA will have a pool that people can go to license the VP8 patents. If google wants to contribute their patents (assuming they have some) to the pool then they will get licensing compensation. If they don't then that doesn't change the fact that MPEGLA is legitimately protecting the rights of the patent holders for patents that VP8 infringes on.
That VP8 infringes on patents is pretty much a sure thing-- unless I'm fundamentally misunderstanding how VP8 works, and even still, there are patents on many other aspects of video and video containers.
Don't be mad at the patent holders for protecting their work- they published it for everyone to benefit from in exchange.
--
* If you've got a better idea for how intellectual property should be protected or not, then, please start a political movement. Don't go after people following he laws as they are. Given the existence of the system, companies must patent and defend their patents. And given that this is the state of the legal framework in the country, suing people for patent violation is perfectly legitimate. The patent is a trade- you reveal your solution in exchange for legal protection. If you cannot sue, then you are not getting the compensation you are promised in this system for revealing your invention. If you wish to go to a system whereby there is no patent system, then recognize that people wouldn't be revealing their inventions, and thus things like android couldn't exist, because they wouldn't have a source of technology to copy.
> I've never understood the objection to MPEGLA. [...] MPEGLA is a licensing agency, so there are no personal or political issues.
They have a vested interest in having their technologies (ones for which they have pools) win over other technologies, and they have a whole chest of patents (aka. legal weapons) with which to intimidate companies who won't come into the fold.
The whole problem of patents is that they give established interests total control over everyone else. At best, the established interests will be content to just take a cut. At worst, the established interests will refuse to license to you, because they don't want a competitor. And they can change their mind on this matter whenever they want.
> That VP8 infringes on patents is pretty much a sure thing-- unless I'm fundamentally misunderstanding how VP8 works
How do you know that h.264 doesn't infringe on Google patents?
> If you wish to go to a system whereby there is no patent system, then recognize that people wouldn't be revealing their inventions, and thus things like android couldn't exist, because they wouldn't have a source of technology to copy.
Are you seriously suggesting that the creators of Android read Apple's patents, as a way of "catching up?" Or that Apple wouldn't have released the iPhone, which is a cash cow for them, if they couldn't patent it?
At worst, the established interests will refuse to license to you, because they don't want a competitor.
Hence patent pools, in which participants who are often direct competitors agree to license to each other and anybody else on the same terms.
Are you seriously suggesting that the creators of Android read Apple's patents, as a way of "catching up?"
I can't speak for him but I don't think that's what he's saying.
You're fixating on the common fallacy that the only things that can or should be patentable are things that cannot possibly be understood except by reading a thorough working description by the party that created it. This is wrong.
I have here on my keychain an instance of patent 4,864,898 "Combination pop-top can and bottle opener". It consists of a shaped piece of plastic with a little piece of metal, and it is completely obvious how it works just by using it. There is no hidden mechanism and nothing that needs explaining. And yet: this did not fall off a tree. This is not a product of nature but of human ingenuity lending greater value to this shape than the equivalent mass of plastic in a less intentional shape. It's that difference that a patent attempts to recognize as an independent thing that has economic value, not the textual description of the patent, which is an artifact of that recognition.
So, to bring that back around: the point is that without patents, any invention which is not either directly tied to the means of production or hidden in a black box loses the bulk of it's economic value and thus the bulk of it's reason for ever being created.
"Or that Apple wouldn't have released the iPhone, which is a cash cow for them, if they couldn't patent it?"
Patents were definitely part of the plan from the start or Jobs wouldn't have stood on stage in front of a giant 200+ slide at the 2007 keynote and said:
"We filed for over 200 patents for all the inventions in iPhone and we intend to protect them."*
With no patents they wouldn't have had any defense against the other mobile phone makers. That's the way it works. You say I infringe your patents, I say you infringe mine, we come to a cross-licencing agreement. Otherwise, I pay you money.
First you say "Apple would still have released the iphone" and then "...they [patents] do allow entrenched interests protect their market from upstarts." You seem to be contradicting yourself.
When Apple released the iPhone, they were the upstart in the mobile phone segment. The patents are what allowed/allows Apple to protect themselves from the 'entrenched interests' of the market. That is what good the patents provide.
> Don't be mad at the patent holders for protecting
> their work- they published it for everyone to
> benefit from in exchange.
Is this really the case anymore? Would the world have been a worse-off place had Amazon not patented One-Click? Would the world be a worse off place had Microsoft not patented parts of FAT32?
The point of patents was to encourage inventors to open up to the world how their inventions worked. There are so many patents granted presently that are not really secrets in any fashion. In most cases, they are just the next iteration in a long line of improvements in a specific area. It has become a me-first free-for-all, where it doesn't matter if the first person that needed to solve problem X would have come up with solution Y (regardless of the person). It just matters who walks down to the patent office first. There are a number examples of patent cases where someone developed something, then someone else saw that and tried to patent it before the original inventor.
The flaw in your statement is your presumption that all (or most) patents should be valid. I argue that most patents granted in the two decades (at least) should never have been granted and do more to hinder innovation than they help it.
> I've never understood the objection to MPEGLA. [...] MPEGLA is a licensing agency, so there are no personal or political issues.
Others have comments on other parts of this statement, but I wanted to mention that the political factors in the patent pool can have significant effects on the codec's final quality.
There are pieces of the MP3 codec which exist only to include the patent. After all, if your patent is in the technology, it is quite a lot of money in royalties you'll be getting. There is extraordinary pressure to get your patented tech into the standard even if it isn't helpful.
When I originally hired Monty to work on Ogg Vorbis fulltime, I also hired Mark Taylor (LAME author) to work on a new codec as well. His idea was essentially to remove all the idiocy from MP3 and leave only the useful pieces. It was an eye opening experience.
There is also the problem that MPEG and ISO have fairly closed membership. This is one reason why the IETF has taken up codec work over the last year or so.
> they published it for everyone to benefit from in exchange.
Although I've upvoted you, I think that this is the fundamental disagreement. I've never felt that I could look up a patent and learn from it. In fact, it seems like a game to write patents as vaguely as possible, to cover things which noone has thought of, but might do in the future. Certainly, I've not seen a patent which manages to get past the legal language such that it is easy to read.
But MPEGLA goes a step further. They take their specs, for example H264, and then annotate them with patent information. So if you're reading section 2.1.1 of the H264 spec, you can look up and see what claims in which patents apply. That's pretty darn awesome, and some pretty good value add and some nice transparency.
It's a nice way to blend the legal (the patent) with the technical (the spec).
Well, that spec sounds useful, but I'm less sure about how the patent helps anyone but the lawyers.
I've read a few, admittedly mostly the infamous patents, and have yet to find anything useful. At worst, we have someone patenting doubly-linked lists (What if, instead of one pointer, lists had two pointers... and they could point anywhere! Or maybe they could have N pointers! Genius!) and other obvious dreck (A stick as a dog toy? Defeated only because two other people already had patents!?)
Or sometimes they file wish claims on things none of their products actually do. They don't require code to actually prove that you even could do what you claim to have invented, even though source code would be analogous to requiring blueprints for machines.
Anyhow, my point would be that I've never heard of anyone reading patents to learn anything about computer programming (maybe they do, but I've never heard of anyone learning that way). Maybe patents are a lot more useful with mechanics, I don't know, but the software patents I've seen are not even useless. Half of them read like they were written by the "I just need a typist, err, coder to implement this for me" people. I've even seen people say "you've got a flowchart, what the hell else do you need?"
Human AI Flowchart:
[Evaluate state of world] -> [Think like a human] -> [Act] -> [Repeat]
(The similarity to the evaluate-apply loop in Lisp should be obvious.)
I've always thought patents were supposed to be detailed enough so that one competent in the field could produce the invention. In SW that is clearly not the case.
I'm not justifying patents. I also think they're generally not useful and destructive. But they are here.
I certainly agree with you there. Sadly, the metrics the politicians appear to be using to grade the health of the system are: "amount of money made by licensing patents" and "number of patents granted."
It doesn't take much imagination to see why those are bad metrics for people more concerned with promoting the progress of science and useful arts.
you're essentially forced by the nature of video and the desire to compress to recognize features of images that exist in multiple frames and then encode based on them
Which is exactly why such methods should not be patentable. Do you really think the VP8 guys had no idea how to do that until they read the H.264 patent? Of course not; it's a strategy that's obvious to skilled engineers, and granting a monopoly to the first entity to file a patent creates huge market inefficiencies and reduced innovation.
things like android couldn't exist, because they wouldn't have a source of technology to copy.
What did Android "copy"? An interface with a grid of icons?
"What did Android "copy"? An interface with a grid of icons?"
In layman terms, yes. You might argue Android copied it from Apple who copied it from Win Mobile who copied it from Windows who copied it from Apple who bought it off Parc. But that would be annoying to read.
If you've got a better idea for how intellectual property should be protected or not, then, please start a political movement. Don't go after people following he laws as they are. Given the existence of the system, companies must patent and defend their patents.
Isn't Google an obvious counter example? They patent software because that is how the system works but they do not use their patents offensively as a business strategy. Just becaus someone isn't breaking the law doesn't mean they are above reproach and doing good work.
We should go after people abusing/influcing the laws in an unfair manner.
Don't be mad at the patent holders for protecting their work- they published it for everyone to benefit from in exchange.
They published the patents because you have to publish patents. Why are you assuming this is a benevolent act?
I've seen zero effort from the anti-IP movement to go after politicians or even try to reach them, and I have seen a lot of FUD and propaganda against selected companies that are determined to somehow be "evil" while other, favored companies get a pass.
I don't understand their motivations, but I'm not convinced that actual change is one of them.
Further, I am not a fan of the current system, but I have yet to see a proposal for an alternative.
Finally, isn't it hypocritical to attack people for operating under the system as it is, when the people doing the attacking are not trying to change the system at all?
Do you see google giving up its patents in any area where it has a competitive advantage?
"The Congress shall have Power [...] to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries[....]"
It shouldn't require an amendment for the Congress to decide to exercise that power differently or not at all, especially if they realize what's happening now doesn't actually promote progress in new fields without a critical mass of open prior art.
Suppose for a moment that you invent something, but don't tell anyone. Then someone else can obviously patent it.
Suppose you publish something on your blog. The patent examiner doesn't read blogs, so someone else can obviously patent it.
Suppose you publish it in a well-respected journal of computer science. The patent examiner doesn't read journals either, so someone can obviously patent it.
Now obviously, none of these patents are valid, but that is not how the patent system works.
Or suppose someone else is trying to patent the exact same invention that's already patented by you. The patent examiner makes a mistake and issues a patent.
Oh, you mean that patent on the stick as a dog toy? Yeah, that one sucked. I can't believe it took four years, a reexamination by the USPTO Director and referencing no less than two prior patents as prior art to invalidate all of its claims:
There is nothing preventing someone else from patenting something you have invented but did not patent. They may not be able to stop you from using your invention, but patents are first-come, first served.
Please, if you are going to make an assertion like that, you need to explain exactly how it is an incorrect statement. Maybe you misunderstood me, or maybe you misunderstand the state of the law. Without an explanation, you leave no opportunity to respond to the specific issue you have, forcing the person who have called out to take a stab in the dark and try to guess why you say this. I feel this is disingenuous.
The incorrectness of your statement is explained in every definition of patent requirements. For example, it's in the 2nd paragraph of Wikipedia article called "Patent". I'll even give you a direct link to this requirement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novelty_(patent)
In this case, then, the parent comment is correct, and you are wrong.
If I invent something, and neither sell it or make it known to the public (thus it continues to meet the novelty requirement), then there is nothing preventing someone else from patenting said invention.
No, the statement is "things have to be patented...". It's incorrect because you can either patent it, or publish without acquiring a patent. (I'm focusing on this part, because the statement was made to justify patenting. It's not, you don't have to patent anything.)
Like I said, if you're going to make such an assertion, please provide an explanation how it is incorrect. Linking to wikipedia as you did is fallacious for more than one reason, including argument from authority, argument from false authority, and on the basic fact that you did not actually make a claim, you just implied someone else made a claim, and left it to me to guess where that claim was made and what part of the second paragraph showed an error in my claim.
The article you linked to actually confirms my assertion by going over the situations where one inventor will get a patent on something another inventor also created. Therefore, one is incentivized to patent something to obtain protection, which is the claim I was making in the first place.
So, not only are you flat out wrong, you have twice been given the opportunity to provide an explanation for your assertion and twice failed to do so. Meaning you are not worth taking seriously because you are apparently more interested in saying I'm wrong than making an argument, which means I think you're trying to argue to the person rather than the point. Downvoting only convinces me of this.
"The incorrectness of your statement is explained in every definition of patent requirements. For example, it's in the 2nd paragraph of Wikipedia article called "Patent". I'll even give you a direct link to this requirement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novelty_(patent)
What would you think about having to license a patent to build a car? What if there were the equivalent of MPEGLA for cars that could prevent you from competing with other legally licensed car manufacturers? What if the licensing authority threatened to sue anyone who distributed, sold or bought your car?
It did happen. You might enjoy learning about Henry Ford's patent struggle against the ALAM (Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers.) They possessed an essential patent to automobiles and wielded it as a weapon against anyone who tried to compete.
>If you wish to go to a system whereby there is no patent system, then recognize that people wouldn't be revealing their inventions, and thus things like android couldn't exist, because they wouldn't have a source of technology to copy.
Congratulations. You win the 'most mind-bogglingly retarded statement of the millennium' award.
In reality, I'm aware that nobody is actually stupid enough to hold such an indefensibly ludicrous position, so you're clearly trolling. Good job though, it's the first troll so successful that I'm not going to read HN again. A community that could give this trash even a single upvote is not a community I want to go anywhere near.
While I wish you couldn't patent software or algorithms we cannot ignore the fact that you can by simply willful ignorance and wishing that the patents go away if we just not think about them.
At the end of this process the thread from submarine patens will be vastly reduced and hardware manufacturers and companies like MS and Apple have a realistic road to supporting VP8.