VP8:Patent Troll after it,Jobs dismisses it.

[ssj6akshat]

http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20100520/googles-royalty-free-webm-video-may-not-be-royalty-free-for-long/

http://www.osnews.com/story/23335/Patent_Troll_Larry_Horn_of_MPEG-LA_Assembling_VP8_Patent_Pool

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/05/20/steve_jobs_says_no_to_googles_vp8_webm_codec.html

This drama is getting fun.

[McRat]

I wish it weren't lawyers who were determining the future of technology. They are the ones who could not pass college math or science, so dad put them in law school.

Software patents for the most part are jokes. Nobody is creating code in a vacuum. Everybody uses algorithms others have written.

It would be like patenting the periodic table, trigonometry, the parathesis, ==, XOR video, etc, etc.

Software used to be Copyright only. And that's how it should have stayed.

[ssj6akshat]

I wish it weren't lawyers who were determining the future of technology. They are the ones who could not pass college math or science, so dad put them in law school.

Software patents for the most part are jokes. Nobody is creating code in a vacuum. Everybody uses algorithms others have written.

It would be like patenting the periodic table, trigonometry, the parathesis, ==, XOR video, etc, etc.

Software used to be Copyright only. And that's how it should have stayed.

Well,that is not true for all lawers but I agree with you on software patents,Unless you are a uber mathematical genius,you can't come up with an all-original algorithm of your own.

[McRat]

Well,that is not true for all lawers but I agree with you on software patents,Unless you are a uber mathematical genius,you can't come up with an all-original algorithm of your own.

I've worked with about 30 different lawyers on technical cases.

I haven't run into one who has a solid grasp of science or math. :P

[gnomeuser]

Lawyers, is there any part of life they can't make suck?

[ssj6akshat]

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." - Shakespeare

www.online-literature.com/shakespeare/henryVI2/14

Oh lol gnomeuser thats in your sig.

[H3g3m0n]

Apple has a patent in H.264 so they get some money from its use.

With that said, they probably spend more on licenses for the other members for deployments of H.264 on iPods/iPhones and OSX since they only have the 1 patent out of hundreds so I'm not too clear why they would wan't H.264 over VP8 other than they are at corporate war with Google, unless there is some backroom deal going on (ie Apple get their patent licenses free).

In any case, even with patent claims from MPEG-LA (and even if they are somewhat valid) this situation is much more of an improvement over Theora. Technical quality aside, MPEG-LA claimed they had patents Theora too (and the technology required to make any modern video codec).

The difference is now Firefox, IE9 (apparently requires a codec) (http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2010/05/19/microsoft-to-support-vp8-in-internet-explorer/), Chrome, Adobe Flash and YouTube will all support it. And with Google saying it's unpatented it many opensource projects will adopt it even if their are legitimate patents (given the patent system, 'gcc helloworld.c' probably violates patents). Companies might threaten to sue commercial redistributers of VP8, but thats already been happening from Microsoft and things like Fat using upper and lowercase for filenames (TomTom (http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090401152339514&query=tomtom), which was dropped by both parties without getting resolved (http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090402200704369&query=tomtom) and could reappear at any time).

It seems to be a very well thought out attack on H.264/MPEG-LA by Google using Firefox, YouTube, Android and GoogleTV. It might also have more loftier goals of nullifying software patents by getting everyone to together with agreements similar to the VP8 license hat says no one can sue anyone, but we will see.

The patent arsenal at play with VP8 is likely to be similar to the H.264 ones, with the 'Don't sue VP8 users' clause in the VP8 license some, maybe even many of those patent holders (http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Licensors.aspx) will be nullified. Particularly Sony who are H.264 patent holders and are also the ones producing the Android based GoogleTV which will have VP8. Also mobile phone manufacturers Siemens and Samsung, when Android 3.0 rolls round unless they specifically remove the VP8 codecs). Plus there are TV manufactures, Panasonic, Mitsubishi, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Sharp, LG that will need to jump on board if GoogleTV takes off. And many other electronic manufacturers that might have to deal with VP8.

A lot of it depends on how much H.264 patents are worth to those companies vs how much Android/GoogleTV/VP8/YouTube is worth. The companies could try and shun VP8 (ie remove it from their GoogleTV/Android offerings, or avoid those platforms in favor of their own). How much Google will push/defend VP8, they could drop H.264 from YouTube (except they already use it for everything since it runs in Flash), they could make sure that the TV companies have to include VP8 in Android if they wan't the proprietary Google stuff like the market included although Google would be concerned about people taking the open Android stack/APIs and making their own cloud services/Apps to remove the Google licensed bits. Microsoft have also said that IE9 would work if you installed the codec, so they get VP8 support without agreeing not to sue VP8 users and still pushing H.264 and the patents they have on it since it needs no 3rd party plugins/codecs. They are a concern having lots of patents, being anti-opensource (although claiming to change) and apparently going around to large companies and asking for license fees on their Linux install and the TomTom lawsuit and it seems fairly likely they had their hands behind the RedHat/Novel lawsuit (won in their favor ☺ (http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20100504120558642)), the patent troll company had ex Microsoft �☺☺ with 3 ex-MS employees working for them including an intellectual property expert that joined a week before the lawsuit.