Imagine if Google accused Bing of copying their search results derived using mathematical formulae known as algorithms...
...oh, hang on they did, then whined about it all over the Internet.
Bunch of hypocrites, Google want to run roughshod over everyone else's IP, taking and adapting whatever they want but the first sign of it happening to them and they chuck a tantrum.
Bunch of hypocrites? Last time I looked google did not threaten a law suit, they merely said they were displeased. In fact I can't remember the last time google sued anyone. They don't believe in software patents either.
Software patents kill innovation. Patenting your software is lazy. It means you no longer have to innovate, you just sue everyone else that does try and innovate in the same space.
I'll leave that to Oracle (Java), the world's writers (Google scanning books project), people with unprotected wifi (streetview privacy invasion) and of course MPEG-LA (among others) to sort out, seeing as I am no more than a "drone"
Meanwhile in light of your comments regarding mathematical formulae, you want to justify why Google should protect their search algorithms, you know seeing as how they are so "open" and all.
Drones = bees = attracted to honeycomb.
Google's search algorithms are secret to protect innovation. They are not patented.
Imagine the apple search business mode:
Build kick ass algorithms
Patent
Sue anyone else that ever creates a search engine for infringement and lay back on innovation.
Imagine if Google accused Bing of copying their search results derived using mathematical formulae known as algorithms...
...oh, hang on they did, then whined about it all over the Internet.
Bunch of hypocrites, Google want to run roughshod over everyone else's IP, taking and adapting whatever they want but the first sign of it happening to them and they chuck a tantrum.
That's disinformation. What they complained of is Bing basically copying Google's results through IE8 and Windows features... Very different from emulating an algorithm, much more akin to cloning a Mac. But we're really comparing Apples and Carrots here
Open Source software makes up only a tiny fraction of the software in use out there. Windows? Mac OS X? Microsoft Office? Photoshop? Any of the 10,000 games in use? Quickbooks? And so on, ad nauseum.
Open Source software is a very minor component of the software industry.
Are you really that ill informed? You have just picked the biggest commercial software and stated therefore open source is a tiny fraction.
Are you so stupid not to know that the majority of software that websites run on is open source. Apache dwarf MS in this space. Even the Mac OSX kernel is based an a fork of freeBSD, an open source *UNIX* system.
Apple's webkit browser engine is open source for god sake. I bet you use more open source software every day than you do commercial shit.
What planet are you from? If software patents were not allowed why would anyone spend time and money developing software if anyone could then just basically copy, steal and call it their own? If a company or person can't make a profit writing software then obviously they won't even bother to try.
So all the computer innovation from the 40's through 1996 did not happen? The internet was not invented? Wow, i have heard of revisionist history before, but nothing quite like this.
Yeah, what happened is they found signs of bing copying their search results then did an experiment.
Heck, even Microsoft didn't deny it and said the results were open to them to copy, when in reality Google's TOS say otherwise.
You think Yahoo let Microsoft use their search engine for free back in the day?
Anyway, the turh of the matter is, patents may be protecting innovation or harming it depending on the case. Thats why there are lawyers and judges. However, currently, the pace of innovation in software (and computers, imho) is much higher than it ever was in any other domain. Hence, the patent 's length is actually too long. Make the patents' life shorter and you already solve a good part of those issues.
In your dream world we wouldn't even be having this discussion. The technologies to communicate would not have been invented due to lack of incentive to do so.
I am an inventor, and I know just how damn hard it is create that which has never been created before. And it's so easy to copy, and so deplorable too. Hard work deserves protection and reward.
really? And what medium are we communicating through right now?
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Hard work deserves protection and reward.
Who says it does not? Copyrights and trademarks do that already as they have for centuries. Software Patents have done nothing but stifle innovation and cripple small companies. The MPEG cartel is a prime example...patent pooling to kill any competing formats.
It's time Apple brings the war to google own land where it's only their blood.
Googles strengths are search, maps & video and using andriod to deliver the Ads into the hands.
First they need to take out the maps, coupled with a device which is cheap enough to hook people into apple subsystem. Then they push a Google competitor like Facebook against it like a video service or such. And this will be the killer make iAds such that it is without a cut to developer and make it available to all platforms. This will opposite to google which make the platform free and ads paid, made the platform paid & ads free.
I understand were your coming from but your last suggestion would alienate developers and junk up the software. It would be nice to see Apple go after Google in a direct and meaningful way.
Anyway, the turh of the matter is, patents may be protecting innovation or harming it depending on the case. Thats why there are lawyers and judges. However, currently, the pace of innovation in software (and computers, imho) is much higher than it ever was in any other domain. Hence, the patent 's length is actually too long. Make the patents' life shorter and you already solve a good part of those issues.
Just remove them altogether. There is no such thing as software patents outside the US anyway. They may not be slowing innovation now but lets look at this in a couple of years.
Just think, if apple won all their lawsuits and ended up the sole supplier of smart phones. They would have no motivation to improve that god awful notification system. There would never be proper multi tasking, the processor would never improve at the same rate. The only that win are the apple senior management and us consumers get screwed.
They didn't copy the algorithm, just the results. And their algorithms are not covered by patents but by simply being secret. Nothing can stop Microsoft from trying to engineer their own algorithm to compete with Google.
Funny thing is that when you're talking about VP8, that's exactly what On2 did to create the standards: they literally took the H264 specifications and tried to rip out everything they thought was covered by patents.
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VP8 aka WebM is NOT patent free; it's patented like anything else and those patents were purchased by Google and they licensed it into the open.
No they didn't, they licensed use of the codec, but not the patents themselves. There are still clauses in the licensing term that will allow Google to pull any right you have using it if you don't play by their rules (e.g: sign a cross-licensing deal with MPEG-LA if it turns out VP8 still infringes on H264 patents and you want to keep selling your VP8 based products). In that regard, WebM is much worse than H264, since while you have to pay a (very reasonable) fee for using it, at the very least you can be 100% sure you are not stepping into a legal minefield because there is only one company holding VP8 patents, and that company explicitly waives any responsibility if *you* get into problems using *their* standard for no good reason besides saving a few pennies. The market confirms that almost no-one actually cares about Googles crappy format or the supposedly evil MPEG-LA royalties anyway, just look around you to find out that nowadays even a $20 knock-off Chinese PMP implements H264 and will have paid the royalties.
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Sorry, but this is just more BS from MPEG-LA. They are nothing but a patent troll organization.
You can only say something like that if you really have no idea what you're talking about and how much expertise and investments are involved creating an advanced codec like H264. I happen to know quite a lot about video codecs having implemented some myself, and you really are oblivious.
What the MPEG-LA does is nothing more than providing a legal safeguard for companies to invest money in the creation of open video standards that are too advanced for any of them to develop themselves. It took MPEG folks (experts from all kinds of fields and companies) that invented the standard about 25 years of work to get to the point where we are now, which is H264. That takes millions if not billions of dollars of investment from commercial parties that benefit from such a standard. Every party involved also benefits if the specification can be open, ie: every aspect of the specification can be published for anyone to see, to allow other companies to implement it properly and base products off of them. It's called standardization.
Now maybe if you use your brain for more than just a few seconds and don't try to view the world as if it were black vs white, good vs evil, patent trolls vs saints, you can see where this is going:
Large investments + new technology + high level of domain-specific expertise + years of development + publicly available specifications + no legal protection = no way of ever recuperating the investment in creating something like an advanced video codec.
Everybody would just take the specifications, implement them, make money off of them, and keep all the profits to themselves as if they did all the hard work.
The funny thing is that people like yourself who think MPEG-LA are 'patent trolls' don't seem to understand what the only alternative is. The alternative would be that every company would develop everything themselves, keep it closed-down, publish no specifications, and sue everyone who reverse-engineered it. We've been there already, when half of the internet and video was only useful on Microsoft-based platforms, video standards were utter crap and nothing properly interoperated with other OS's. Back then you couldn't even view *any* video on Linux based systems because everything used licensed technology like WMV or Indeo video. THAT was stifling innovation, not the fact that commercial entities have to pay a few pennies for using H264.
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You want MPEG-LA to win? This same organization is suing for royalties from apple and others over BS patents regarding phones they got. Sorry, the MPEG part of the name used to mean something, now all they do is make "patent pools" for anything they come across.
Just quoted this last bit to show again how your frame of reference is simply too small to be talking about this topic. I'm not a big proponent of software patents themselves, especially not the trivial ones, but that's a completely different discussion. If you think the patent system is rotten (it is) go complain to the US patent office. The fact that there are so many patent trolls around and so many trivial patents, doesn't mean no patentable technology (even if it is software) exists at all. If there's only *one* example where software patents make sense it would be video encoding technology, which is served by open standards but requires high investments and expertise to develop.
The fact that Google decided to try to push a ripped-off H264 codec that desperately tries to sidestep all of the patents held by MPEG-LA confirms why stuff like this has to be patentable. You are accusing MPEG-LA of being patent trolls, but Google nicely shows you why MPEG-LA needs to have 1000s of patents on H264 in the first place.
You saying 'MPEG' in 'MPEG-LA' used to mean something again shows you are making statements about things you simply don't understand. MPEG-LA and MPEG are completely unrelated. MPEG (motion picture experts group) is just a collective that develops and designs all the cool technology you are benefiting from every day. MPEG-LA is the club of companies that paid for that work, invested their money so the MPEG folks could do their work, commissioning them to make better video codecs, ie: funding them, in exactly the same way there are private companies investing money in cancer research and new pharmaceuticals.
When MPEG-LA decides they want to increase revenues in a few years by increasing fees for H.264, I'm sure you'll see them begin suing all sorts of people.
The organization is basically designed to aggressively sue anyone who comes close to infringing their "intellectual property". Humorous that anyone remotely coming close to accusing Apple of intellectual property theft gets eviscerated as just being a greedy lawyer, but when the same happens to Google, everyone sides with the lawyers and patent trolls.
...
This post seems like a gross exaggeration of the real situation and chock-a-block full of paranoia as well.
People should remember that the folks who own the patents in MPEG LA are actually the people that invented the codecs in the first place. It's not the same thing as Google copying iOS.
This isn't like the average IP property fight where the company that owns the IP is itself a devious, immoral entity that merely purchased the IP instead of creating it themselves. It also isn't anything like most patent fights where someone is trolling with an overly broad or only tangentially related patent. As the article mentions (quite clearly), the infringing content if discovered, would have to be crucial to WebM, not just "kind of the same."
As far as I've been able to ascertain, the patent owners here are the very people that thought this stuff up, so why would they not deserve to get paid?
Lots of people dispute whether software patents should exist at all, but assuming they do, this kind of thing is the very thing that *should* be patented, and that very thing that people *should* be remunerated for.
I am an inventor, and I know just how damn hard it is create that which has never been created before. And it's so easy to copy, and so deplorable too. Hard work deserves protection and reward.
Yup. I love how so many who have never created anything are so quick to dismiss those who wish to be rewarded for their invention. Sure, software patents aren't perfect, but that doesn't mean the concept is wholly without value.
I know this is well beyond the comprehension of the drones on this board, but imagine if mathematic formulas were patentable. We would still be living in caves. Ever hear of trademarks and copyrights? And not everyones motive are based purely on greed.
educate yourself before you speak. I know that is asking a lot in the age of Faux News.
Why should I imagine mathematic formulas as patentable when they are not? Imagine mother's milk as being poison and that most of us would be dead and not living in your caves. Is either imagined scenario relevant to the the topic? I think not.
Of course I have heard about trademarks and copyrights. I am not an expert on either one and I don't profess to be but I do know that they are not the same as a patent. Our patent rules may be too general in many ways but need revision not abolition. Software patent protection is necessary.
I also disagree with you on greed because I believe that almost everyone (if not all people's) motive is greed based with the only difference being each individual's level of greed. You may call it whatever you want, to make it more palatable, but when all is said and done all it turns out to be is just a different level of greed.
No they didn't, they licensed use of the codec, but not the patents themselves. There are still clauses in the licensing term that will allow Google to pull any right you have using it if you don't play by their rules (e.g: sign a cross-licensing deal with MPEG-LA if it turns out VP8 still infringes on H264 patents and you want to keep selling your VP8 based products). In that regard, WebM is much worse than H264, since while you have to pay a (very reasonable) fee for using it, at the very least you can be 100% sure you are not stepping into a legal minefield because there is only one company holding VP8 patents, and that company explicitly waives any responsibility if *you* get into problems using *their* standard for no good reason besides saving a few pennies. The market confirms that almost no-one actually cares about Googles crappy format or the supposedly evil MPEG-LA royalties anyway, just look around you to find out that nowadays even a $20 knock-off Chinese PMP implements H264 and will have paid the royalties.
The only clause for losing the rights to a license over webm is if you sue the webm organization. That's to use it as a bargaining chip if MPEG-LA holders decide to sue.
Nowhere does MPEG-LA grant any indemification either if another patent holder sues over h.264. While the situation appears better it took over a decade for all the patent lawsuits to be cleared up over the ancient MPEG1-Layer III audio codec.
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You can only say something like that if you really have no idea what you're talking about and how much expertise and investments are involved creating an advanced codec like H264. I happen to know quite a lot about video codecs having implemented some myself, and you really are oblivious.
What the MPEG-LA does is nothing more than providing a legal safeguard for companies to invest money in the creation of open video standards that are too advanced for any of them to develop themselves. It took MPEG folks (experts from all kinds of fields and companies) that invented the standard about 25 years of work to get to the point where we are now, which is H264. That takes millions if not billions of dollars of investment from commercial parties that benefit from such a standard. Every party involved also benefits if the specification can be open, ie: every aspect of the specification can be published for anyone to see, to allow other companies to implement it properly and base products off of them. It's called standardization.
Nowhere did I deny this point; Mr. Horn aka CEO of MPEG-LA is himself going after others as a non practicing entity of MobileMedia over phone patents.
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Now maybe if you use your brain for more than just a few seconds and don't try to view the world as if it were black vs white, good vs evil, patent trolls vs saints, you can see where this is going:
Large investments + new technology + high level of domain-specific expertise + years of development + publicly available specifications + no legal protection = no way of ever recuperating the investment in creating something like an advanced video codec.
Everybody would just take the specifications, implement them, make money off of them, and keep all the profits to themselves as if they did all the hard work.
...
The fact that Google decided to try to push a ripped-off H264 codec that desperately tries to sidestep all of the patents held by MPEG-LA confirms why stuff like this has to be patentable. You are accusing MPEG-LA of being patent trolls, but Google nicely shows you why MPEG-LA needs to have 1000s of patents on H264 in the first place.
Except for the fact that On2's work predates H.264 and there is a chance that MPEG are liable for infringement. VP8/webm is inferior as a codec, but that is partly because they didn't implement the one main feature that could make it better, b-frames, because they didn't want to step on MPEG's patents.
There are probably many aspects of H.264 that are not software based, but this whole argument that patents are necessary to protect work is a bit ridiculous; copyright grants the necessary protection needed for software. Patents were never meant to protect ideas, nor math or software, yet the stupid patent office grants them day in and day out. While people argue that software patents are necessary to protect innovation, they forget that the reason why they were excluded in the first place is not because they didn't want to grant that protection, it is because it brings up weird issues. For example, someone can come up with a equation to figure out a desired result, but if I can run that equation right in my head, am I infringing?
Apple's multi touch patents are a good example of this. They didn't invent a multi-touch screen, just a gesture and the whole scrolling routine. The problem with this is the idea is implemented 100% in software, and typically in software you can accomplish tasks only one way. What if I find a different way to implement that idea/feature in software? Am I still infringing?
Apple patenting a sliding switch on a screen is just a software implementation of a hardware switch. Nothing new, nothing novel about it; just a software routine made to work as a switch on software. Yet it was granted a patent. Now those who use android are liable because it uses a connecting dot system to unlock the phone, which is more novel and non obvious that apple's idea by far. Neither deserve nor need patent protection. Each requires their own work and programming to implement, and as long as neither steals source code to do the work, it isn't stealing the mythical "IP".
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The funny thing is that people like yourself who think MPEG-LA are 'patent trolls' don't seem to understand what the only alternative is. The alternative would be that every company would develop everything themselves, keep it closed-down, publish no specifications, and sue everyone who reverse-engineered it. We've been there already, when half of the internet and video was only useful on Microsoft-based platforms, video standards were utter crap and nothing properly interoperated with other OS's. Back then you couldn't even view *any* video on Linux based systems because everything used licensed technology like WMV or Indeo video. THAT was stifling innovation, not the fact that commercial entities have to pay a few pennies for using H264.
Right. I'm not the organization who turns a deaf ear to Ziph's request for making sure their codec doesn't infringe on MPEG's.
And btw, you can't sue someone for reverse engineering.
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You saying 'MPEG' in 'MPEG-LA' used to mean something again shows you are making statements about things you simply don't understand. MPEG-LA and MPEG are completely unrelated. MPEG (motion picture experts group) is just a collective that develops and designs all the cool technology you are benefiting from every day. MPEG-LA is the club of companies that paid for that work, invested their money so the MPEG folks could do their work, commissioning them to make better video codecs, ie: funding them, in exactly the same way there are private companies investing money in cancer research and new pharmaceuticals.
The compaines that make up MPEG are the same that comprise MPEG-LA; they setup the "LA" part to make it easier to license the patent and make sure that all involved submitted their slice of the pie.
MPEG-LA going out of its way to get people to submit patents for a codec they have no dealings with for the cynical purpose of protecting their revenue stream isn't what it was meant to do in the first place.
They didn't give two shits about VP6, VP8 or even the ancient VP3 until Google made it popular. Waiting for it to become popular then using your patents to stifle competitors is what this is all about.
Google will beat Apple in this area too - the most sued company of all time. With Oracle and MPEG LA clamping on them this decade will see Google beefing up its legal team to new heights. Apple took that reign from Microsoft and now Google is next.
Comments
Imagine if Google accused Bing of copying their search results derived using mathematical formulae known as algorithms...
...oh, hang on they did, then whined about it all over the Internet.
Bunch of hypocrites, Google want to run roughshod over everyone else's IP, taking and adapting whatever they want but the first sign of it happening to them and they chuck a tantrum.
Bunch of hypocrites? Last time I looked google did not threaten a law suit, they merely said they were displeased. In fact I can't remember the last time google sued anyone. They don't believe in software patents either.
Software patents kill innovation. Patenting your software is lazy. It means you no longer have to innovate, you just sue everyone else that does try and innovate in the same space.
I'll leave that to Oracle (Java), the world's writers (Google scanning books project), people with unprotected wifi (streetview privacy invasion) and of course MPEG-LA (among others) to sort out, seeing as I am no more than a "drone"
Meanwhile in light of your comments regarding mathematical formulae, you want to justify why Google should protect their search algorithms, you know seeing as how they are so "open" and all.
Drones = bees = attracted to honeycomb.
Google's search algorithms are secret to protect innovation. They are not patented.
Imagine the apple search business mode:
Build kick ass algorithms
Patent
Sue anyone else that ever creates a search engine for infringement and lay back on innovation.
Why don't you go Google (wish there was a markup for irony) it, it's all over the web and twitter.
Yeah, what happened is they found signs of bing copying their search results then did an experiment.
Heck, even Microsoft didn't deny it and said the results were open to them to copy, when in reality Google's TOS say otherwise.
You think Yahoo let Microsoft use their search engine for free back in the day?
Imagine if Google accused Bing of copying their search results derived using mathematical formulae known as algorithms...
...oh, hang on they did, then whined about it all over the Internet.
Bunch of hypocrites, Google want to run roughshod over everyone else's IP, taking and adapting whatever they want but the first sign of it happening to them and they chuck a tantrum.
That's disinformation. What they complained of is Bing basically copying Google's results through IE8 and Windows features... Very different from emulating an algorithm, much more akin to cloning a Mac. But we're really comparing Apples and Carrots here
Google is full of it.
Open Source software makes up only a tiny fraction of the software in use out there. Windows? Mac OS X? Microsoft Office? Photoshop? Any of the 10,000 games in use? Quickbooks? And so on, ad nauseum.
Open Source software is a very minor component of the software industry.
Are you really that ill informed? You have just picked the biggest commercial software and stated therefore open source is a tiny fraction.
Are you so stupid not to know that the majority of software that websites run on is open source. Apache dwarf MS in this space. Even the Mac OSX kernel is based an a fork of freeBSD, an open source *UNIX* system.
Apple's webkit browser engine is open source for god sake. I bet you use more open source software every day than you do commercial shit.
What planet are you from? If software patents were not allowed why would anyone spend time and money developing software if anyone could then just basically copy, steal and call it their own? If a company or person can't make a profit writing software then obviously they won't even bother to try.
So all the computer innovation from the 40's through 1996 did not happen? The internet was not invented? Wow, i have heard of revisionist history before, but nothing quite like this.
Yeah, what happened is they found signs of bing copying their search results then did an experiment.
Heck, even Microsoft didn't deny it and said the results were open to them to copy, when in reality Google's TOS say otherwise.
You think Yahoo let Microsoft use their search engine for free back in the day?
Anyway, the turh of the matter is, patents may be protecting innovation or harming it depending on the case. Thats why there are lawyers and judges. However, currently, the pace of innovation in software (and computers, imho) is much higher than it ever was in any other domain. Hence, the patent 's length is actually too long. Make the patents' life shorter and you already solve a good part of those issues.
In your dream world we wouldn't even be having this discussion. The technologies to communicate would not have been invented due to lack of incentive to do so.
I am an inventor, and I know just how damn hard it is create that which has never been created before. And it's so easy to copy, and so deplorable too. Hard work deserves protection and reward.
really? And what medium are we communicating through right now?
Hard work deserves protection and reward.
Who says it does not? Copyrights and trademarks do that already as they have for centuries. Software Patents have done nothing but stifle innovation and cripple small companies. The MPEG cartel is a prime example...patent pooling to kill any competing formats.
It's time Apple brings the war to google own land where it's only their blood.
Googles strengths are search, maps & video and using andriod to deliver the Ads into the hands.
First they need to take out the maps, coupled with a device which is cheap enough to hook people into apple subsystem. Then they push a Google competitor like Facebook against it like a video service or such. And this will be the killer make iAds such that it is without a cut to developer and make it available to all platforms. This will opposite to google which make the platform free and ads paid, made the platform paid & ads free.
I understand were your coming from but your last suggestion would alienate developers and junk up the software. It would be nice to see Apple go after Google in a direct and meaningful way.
Anyway, the turh of the matter is, patents may be protecting innovation or harming it depending on the case. Thats why there are lawyers and judges. However, currently, the pace of innovation in software (and computers, imho) is much higher than it ever was in any other domain. Hence, the patent 's length is actually too long. Make the patents' life shorter and you already solve a good part of those issues.
Just remove them altogether. There is no such thing as software patents outside the US anyway. They may not be slowing innovation now but lets look at this in a couple of years.
Just think, if apple won all their lawsuits and ended up the sole supplier of smart phones. They would have no motivation to improve that god awful notification system. There would never be proper multi tasking, the processor would never improve at the same rate. The only that win are the apple senior management and us consumers get screwed.
Thus: Don't Be Evil.
They didn't copy the algorithm, just the results. And their algorithms are not covered by patents but by simply being secret. Nothing can stop Microsoft from trying to engineer their own algorithm to compete with Google.
Funny thing is that when you're talking about VP8, that's exactly what On2 did to create the standards: they literally took the H264 specifications and tried to rip out everything they thought was covered by patents.
VP8 aka WebM is NOT patent free; it's patented like anything else and those patents were purchased by Google and they licensed it into the open.
No they didn't, they licensed use of the codec, but not the patents themselves. There are still clauses in the licensing term that will allow Google to pull any right you have using it if you don't play by their rules (e.g: sign a cross-licensing deal with MPEG-LA if it turns out VP8 still infringes on H264 patents and you want to keep selling your VP8 based products). In that regard, WebM is much worse than H264, since while you have to pay a (very reasonable) fee for using it, at the very least you can be 100% sure you are not stepping into a legal minefield because there is only one company holding VP8 patents, and that company explicitly waives any responsibility if *you* get into problems using *their* standard for no good reason besides saving a few pennies. The market confirms that almost no-one actually cares about Googles crappy format or the supposedly evil MPEG-LA royalties anyway, just look around you to find out that nowadays even a $20 knock-off Chinese PMP implements H264 and will have paid the royalties.
Sorry, but this is just more BS from MPEG-LA. They are nothing but a patent troll organization.
You can only say something like that if you really have no idea what you're talking about and how much expertise and investments are involved creating an advanced codec like H264. I happen to know quite a lot about video codecs having implemented some myself, and you really are oblivious.
What the MPEG-LA does is nothing more than providing a legal safeguard for companies to invest money in the creation of open video standards that are too advanced for any of them to develop themselves. It took MPEG folks (experts from all kinds of fields and companies) that invented the standard about 25 years of work to get to the point where we are now, which is H264. That takes millions if not billions of dollars of investment from commercial parties that benefit from such a standard. Every party involved also benefits if the specification can be open, ie: every aspect of the specification can be published for anyone to see, to allow other companies to implement it properly and base products off of them. It's called standardization.
Now maybe if you use your brain for more than just a few seconds and don't try to view the world as if it were black vs white, good vs evil, patent trolls vs saints, you can see where this is going:
Large investments + new technology + high level of domain-specific expertise + years of development + publicly available specifications + no legal protection = no way of ever recuperating the investment in creating something like an advanced video codec.
Everybody would just take the specifications, implement them, make money off of them, and keep all the profits to themselves as if they did all the hard work.
The funny thing is that people like yourself who think MPEG-LA are 'patent trolls' don't seem to understand what the only alternative is. The alternative would be that every company would develop everything themselves, keep it closed-down, publish no specifications, and sue everyone who reverse-engineered it. We've been there already, when half of the internet and video was only useful on Microsoft-based platforms, video standards were utter crap and nothing properly interoperated with other OS's. Back then you couldn't even view *any* video on Linux based systems because everything used licensed technology like WMV or Indeo video. THAT was stifling innovation, not the fact that commercial entities have to pay a few pennies for using H264.
You want MPEG-LA to win? This same organization is suing for royalties from apple and others over BS patents regarding phones they got. Sorry, the MPEG part of the name used to mean something, now all they do is make "patent pools" for anything they come across.
Just quoted this last bit to show again how your frame of reference is simply too small to be talking about this topic. I'm not a big proponent of software patents themselves, especially not the trivial ones, but that's a completely different discussion. If you think the patent system is rotten (it is) go complain to the US patent office. The fact that there are so many patent trolls around and so many trivial patents, doesn't mean no patentable technology (even if it is software) exists at all. If there's only *one* example where software patents make sense it would be video encoding technology, which is served by open standards but requires high investments and expertise to develop.
The fact that Google decided to try to push a ripped-off H264 codec that desperately tries to sidestep all of the patents held by MPEG-LA confirms why stuff like this has to be patentable. You are accusing MPEG-LA of being patent trolls, but Google nicely shows you why MPEG-LA needs to have 1000s of patents on H264 in the first place.
You saying 'MPEG' in 'MPEG-LA' used to mean something again shows you are making statements about things you simply don't understand. MPEG-LA and MPEG are completely unrelated. MPEG (motion picture experts group) is just a collective that develops and designs all the cool technology you are benefiting from every day. MPEG-LA is the club of companies that paid for that work, invested their money so the MPEG folks could do their work, commissioning them to make better video codecs, ie: funding them, in exactly the same way there are private companies investing money in cancer research and new pharmaceuticals.
When MPEG-LA decides they want to increase revenues in a few years by increasing fees for H.264, I'm sure you'll see them begin suing all sorts of people.
The organization is basically designed to aggressively sue anyone who comes close to infringing their "intellectual property". Humorous that anyone remotely coming close to accusing Apple of intellectual property theft gets eviscerated as just being a greedy lawyer, but when the same happens to Google, everyone sides with the lawyers and patent trolls.
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This post seems like a gross exaggeration of the real situation and chock-a-block full of paranoia as well.
People should remember that the folks who own the patents in MPEG LA are actually the people that invented the codecs in the first place. It's not the same thing as Google copying iOS.
This isn't like the average IP property fight where the company that owns the IP is itself a devious, immoral entity that merely purchased the IP instead of creating it themselves. It also isn't anything like most patent fights where someone is trolling with an overly broad or only tangentially related patent. As the article mentions (quite clearly), the infringing content if discovered, would have to be crucial to WebM, not just "kind of the same."
As far as I've been able to ascertain, the patent owners here are the very people that thought this stuff up, so why would they not deserve to get paid?
Lots of people dispute whether software patents should exist at all, but assuming they do, this kind of thing is the very thing that *should* be patented, and that very thing that people *should* be remunerated for.
I am an inventor, and I know just how damn hard it is create that which has never been created before. And it's so easy to copy, and so deplorable too. Hard work deserves protection and reward.
Yup. I love how so many who have never created anything are so quick to dismiss those who wish to be rewarded for their invention. Sure, software patents aren't perfect, but that doesn't mean the concept is wholly without value.
I know this is well beyond the comprehension of the drones on this board, but imagine if mathematic formulas were patentable. We would still be living in caves. Ever hear of trademarks and copyrights? And not everyones motive are based purely on greed.
educate yourself before you speak. I know that is asking a lot in the age of Faux News.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/07/why...tware-patents/
http://www.jerf.org/writings/communi...ics/node6.html
hmmm, 'bullhead' very appropriate.
Why should I imagine mathematic formulas as patentable when they are not? Imagine mother's milk as being poison and that most of us would be dead and not living in your caves. Is either imagined scenario relevant to the the topic? I think not.
Of course I have heard about trademarks and copyrights. I am not an expert on either one and I don't profess to be but I do know that they are not the same as a patent. Our patent rules may be too general in many ways but need revision not abolition. Software patent protection is necessary.
I also disagree with you on greed because I believe that almost everyone (if not all people's) motive is greed based with the only difference being each individual's level of greed. You may call it whatever you want, to make it more palatable, but when all is said and done all it turns out to be is just a different level of greed.
Patenting your software is lazy. It means you no longer have to innovate, you just sue everyone else that does try and innovate in the same space.
Sweeping generalizations are lazy. Software patents are a flawed yet necessary evil.
No they didn't, they licensed use of the codec, but not the patents themselves. There are still clauses in the licensing term that will allow Google to pull any right you have using it if you don't play by their rules (e.g: sign a cross-licensing deal with MPEG-LA if it turns out VP8 still infringes on H264 patents and you want to keep selling your VP8 based products). In that regard, WebM is much worse than H264, since while you have to pay a (very reasonable) fee for using it, at the very least you can be 100% sure you are not stepping into a legal minefield because there is only one company holding VP8 patents, and that company explicitly waives any responsibility if *you* get into problems using *their* standard for no good reason besides saving a few pennies. The market confirms that almost no-one actually cares about Googles crappy format or the supposedly evil MPEG-LA royalties anyway, just look around you to find out that nowadays even a $20 knock-off Chinese PMP implements H264 and will have paid the royalties.
The only clause for losing the rights to a license over webm is if you sue the webm organization. That's to use it as a bargaining chip if MPEG-LA holders decide to sue.
Nowhere does MPEG-LA grant any indemification either if another patent holder sues over h.264. While the situation appears better it took over a decade for all the patent lawsuits to be cleared up over the ancient MPEG1-Layer III audio codec.
You can only say something like that if you really have no idea what you're talking about and how much expertise and investments are involved creating an advanced codec like H264. I happen to know quite a lot about video codecs having implemented some myself, and you really are oblivious.
What the MPEG-LA does is nothing more than providing a legal safeguard for companies to invest money in the creation of open video standards that are too advanced for any of them to develop themselves. It took MPEG folks (experts from all kinds of fields and companies) that invented the standard about 25 years of work to get to the point where we are now, which is H264. That takes millions if not billions of dollars of investment from commercial parties that benefit from such a standard. Every party involved also benefits if the specification can be open, ie: every aspect of the specification can be published for anyone to see, to allow other companies to implement it properly and base products off of them. It's called standardization.
Nowhere did I deny this point; Mr. Horn aka CEO of MPEG-LA is himself going after others as a non practicing entity of MobileMedia over phone patents.
Now maybe if you use your brain for more than just a few seconds and don't try to view the world as if it were black vs white, good vs evil, patent trolls vs saints, you can see where this is going:
Large investments + new technology + high level of domain-specific expertise + years of development + publicly available specifications + no legal protection = no way of ever recuperating the investment in creating something like an advanced video codec.
Everybody would just take the specifications, implement them, make money off of them, and keep all the profits to themselves as if they did all the hard work.
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The fact that Google decided to try to push a ripped-off H264 codec that desperately tries to sidestep all of the patents held by MPEG-LA confirms why stuff like this has to be patentable. You are accusing MPEG-LA of being patent trolls, but Google nicely shows you why MPEG-LA needs to have 1000s of patents on H264 in the first place.
Except for the fact that On2's work predates H.264 and there is a chance that MPEG are liable for infringement. VP8/webm is inferior as a codec, but that is partly because they didn't implement the one main feature that could make it better, b-frames, because they didn't want to step on MPEG's patents.
There are probably many aspects of H.264 that are not software based, but this whole argument that patents are necessary to protect work is a bit ridiculous; copyright grants the necessary protection needed for software. Patents were never meant to protect ideas, nor math or software, yet the stupid patent office grants them day in and day out. While people argue that software patents are necessary to protect innovation, they forget that the reason why they were excluded in the first place is not because they didn't want to grant that protection, it is because it brings up weird issues. For example, someone can come up with a equation to figure out a desired result, but if I can run that equation right in my head, am I infringing?
Apple's multi touch patents are a good example of this. They didn't invent a multi-touch screen, just a gesture and the whole scrolling routine. The problem with this is the idea is implemented 100% in software, and typically in software you can accomplish tasks only one way. What if I find a different way to implement that idea/feature in software? Am I still infringing?
Apple patenting a sliding switch on a screen is just a software implementation of a hardware switch. Nothing new, nothing novel about it; just a software routine made to work as a switch on software. Yet it was granted a patent. Now those who use android are liable because it uses a connecting dot system to unlock the phone, which is more novel and non obvious that apple's idea by far. Neither deserve nor need patent protection. Each requires their own work and programming to implement, and as long as neither steals source code to do the work, it isn't stealing the mythical "IP".
The funny thing is that people like yourself who think MPEG-LA are 'patent trolls' don't seem to understand what the only alternative is. The alternative would be that every company would develop everything themselves, keep it closed-down, publish no specifications, and sue everyone who reverse-engineered it. We've been there already, when half of the internet and video was only useful on Microsoft-based platforms, video standards were utter crap and nothing properly interoperated with other OS's. Back then you couldn't even view *any* video on Linux based systems because everything used licensed technology like WMV or Indeo video. THAT was stifling innovation, not the fact that commercial entities have to pay a few pennies for using H264.
Right. I'm not the organization who turns a deaf ear to Ziph's request for making sure their codec doesn't infringe on MPEG's.
And btw, you can't sue someone for reverse engineering.
You saying 'MPEG' in 'MPEG-LA' used to mean something again shows you are making statements about things you simply don't understand. MPEG-LA and MPEG are completely unrelated. MPEG (motion picture experts group) is just a collective that develops and designs all the cool technology you are benefiting from every day. MPEG-LA is the club of companies that paid for that work, invested their money so the MPEG folks could do their work, commissioning them to make better video codecs, ie: funding them, in exactly the same way there are private companies investing money in cancer research and new pharmaceuticals.
The compaines that make up MPEG are the same that comprise MPEG-LA; they setup the "LA" part to make it easier to license the patent and make sure that all involved submitted their slice of the pie.
MPEG-LA going out of its way to get people to submit patents for a codec they have no dealings with for the cynical purpose of protecting their revenue stream isn't what it was meant to do in the first place.
They didn't give two shits about VP6, VP8 or even the ancient VP3 until Google made it popular. Waiting for it to become popular then using your patents to stifle competitors is what this is all about.
Google's search algorithms are secret to protect innovation. They are not patented.
Imagine the apple search business mode:
Build kick ass algorithms
Patent
Sue anyone else that ever creates a search engine for infringement and lay back on innovation.
Um. They methods are certainly patented.
You might want to look into their page rank patent.