Wasn't this the patent that stopped FaceTime from being an open standard?
Sad.
Damn patent trolls :(
Sad.
Damn patent trolls :(
The manufacturers proposed as settlement disable the feature being toggleable, and this was accepted.
The patent holder never got money, and people never stopped using his patent, they only made users unable to select if theg wanted silent mode or not.
A rrsult of this: WD has been for a while making low end WD Black and high end WD Blue with shared mechanics.
One model in particular, the WD Black 1TB is almost 100% identical to the blue version. Except it had acoustic management off, while blue had it on.
After noise complaints (people even returned hdds thinking it was broken) they made the black have it 100% identical to the blue... but as result despite being now silent, it is 30% slower, slow enough to cause buffer problems for musicians and video editors. (or to make megatexture problematic in id software games).
So in the end everyone lost. No money for troll, algorithm is still in use, but consumers now have problems to find the hdd they want (almost no manufacturer advertise the hdd is not silent... so if you need to buy a fast hdd, it is trial and error)
I assumed it was Apple marketing bullshit not external forces?
H.264 happened because the patent owners agreed to the standard not because the H.264 committee had some sort of legal authority to ignore the patent owners.
Originally it worked similar to iMessage in that you had a system to exchange identities but the actual communication was all P2P after that.
Apple had to change it to use their servers to get around the patents (which VirnetX claimed wasn't enough and was still infringing).
Once that changed there was no point in releasing it as an open standard since it required Apple's servers to operate.
If VirnetX prevails then Skype, Google Hangouts, and everyone else is infringing too and VirnetX will use the precedent to go after them as well. It's a common strategy: go after a couple of people first, establish a win, then use that to leverage settlements out of the remaining players.