Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 25th Mar 2013 21:09 UTC
Late last week, Nokia dropped what many consider to be a bomb on the WebM project: a list of patents that VP8 supposedly infringes in the form of an IETF IPR declaration. The list has made the rounds around the web, often reported as proof that VP8 infringes upon Nokia's patents. All this stuff rang a bell. Haven't we been here before? Yup, we have, with another open source codec called Opus. Qualcomm and Huawei made the same claims as Nokia did, but they turned out to be complete bogus. As it turns out, this is standard practice in the dirty business of the patent licensing industry.
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Member since:
2006-01-25
There is no pending Nokia patent suit. An IETF IPR declaration is not a suit - it is a commonplace procedure for patent holders to make the IETF aware of 3rd party patents that apply to pending drafts so that they can be reviewed for suitability.
I would be very surprised if Nokia actually files suit against Google over this. They are simply trying to bar VP8 from being used in IETF standards, partially to just cause Google grief and get some free press, but more than likely just to throw everything at the wall and see if anything sticks. They are essentially gaming the system to get free patent reviews - if there is anything to this we will know if a few months.
The reality is that I doubt MPEGLA knew anything about this - it is probably the other way around... Nokia threw this together as soon as they found out Google caved to MPEGLA, hoping for an easy payoff (or possibly to have some additional leverage in settling their other lawsuits with Google). If any of these patents are found to be applicable that is exactly what will likely happen - no lawsuit required (blood sucking lawyers are very expensive)...
Edited 2013-03-26 15:34 UTC