
Well, well, well. The MPEG-LA is showing its true colours. After a decade of threatening to patent troll the living heck out of Theora, the company
led by a patent troll has now finally put its money where its mouth is. Well, sort of. They don't actually have any patents yet, they're
asking people to submit patents they believe are essential to the VP8 specification.
Update: MPEG (so not the MPEG-LA) has
announced its intent to develop a new video compression standard for the web which will be royalty-free. "The new standard is intended to achieve substantially better compression performance than that offered by MPEG-2 and possibly comparable to that offered by the AVC Baseline Profile. MPEG will issue a call for proposals on video compression technology at the end of its upcoming meeting in March 2011 that is expected to lead to a standard falling under ISO/IEC 'Type-1 licensing', i.e. intended to be 'royalty free'."
Member since:
2008-12-10
There are some great points here, thanks for the post.
However, your final point about Google using their early access to the iPhone to build Android doesn't take account of the fact that Andy Rubin's Android Inc pre-dates (or at least is extremely contemporaneous with) what is publicly known about the start of the iPhone project.
http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobile-phone...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_iPhone