Lead OGG Dev Responds to Jobs Jibes | Hacker News Reader

Lead OGG Dev Responds to Jobs Jibes

blog.ibeentoubuntu.com

111 pointsalexkay18 comments

See also Monty Montgomery (original author of Ogg and founder of Xiph.org) commenting on this Slashdot post:

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/04/30/237238/Steve-Jobs-Hin...

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"Thomson Multimedia made their first veiled patent threats against Vorbis almost ten years ago. MPEG-LA has been rumbling for the past few years. Maybe this time it will actually come to something, but it hasn't yet. I'll get worried when the lawyers advise me to; i.e., not yet.

"The MPEG-LA has insinuated for some time that it is impossible to build any video codec without infringing on at least some of their patents. That is, they assert they have a monopoly on all digital video compression technology, period, and it is illegal to even attempt to compete with them. Of course, they've been careful not to say quite exactly that."

It looks like this poster does not know the difference between Christopher "Monty" Montgomery (aka xiphmont) and Gregory Maxwell. While Gregory is a prominent Ogg developer, Monty is the one who designed the Ogg container and the Vorbis audio format, the lead developer of most things Oggish, and the one who engaged in a recent debate about the quality of the Ogg container.

To be fair gmaxwell has been defending ogg as a container format on lwn, but I am not aware of him writing a dissertation on it.

Of course Jobs' answer is pure FUD. The MPEG LA and its Members (e.g. Apple) should either sue or shut up.

It seems they're even more thrust into the sue-now-or-never position given Jobs's unwise email. Now that one of the patent-pool members has made an explicit, public threat of a patent lawsuit, the longer they wait, the more that estoppel tends against them.

That's one excellent reason why as the CEO of a big company you should probably not be sending out emails to end users as a PR gimmick, stuff you write can come back to bite you, if you write it as the CEO then it can bite badly.

I've seen at least one situation where personal e-mail "from the CEO" was actually written by a committee, both to reduce individual liability and to free up more of the CEO's time. It was possible to identify who actually wrote the e-mail by the number of dashes used to separate the signature from the e-mail body. It's somewhat possible that, when it comes to e-mail, "Steve Jobs" is the official name of a cadre of executives and PR people with varying levels of expertise. Whether that actually is the case, or whether it actually works to provide plausible deniability, I don't know.

Who ever said Apple is a member of the patent pool? Jobs certainly didn't, and Apple is not the sort of company that would own that kind of patent.

I just read the mpeg LA roster (the pdf is posted in this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1312344), and I can't find Apple amongst the member list.

Most of the other usual suspects are there (Microsoft, Samsung, Philips, etc), but Apple isn't mentioned, which is weird because on the http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Licensors.aspx site they are listed prominently.

Any explanation for that ?

It might be that Apple joined MPEG LA after 2005 (when the PDF is dated) since their only patent listed in the pool was issued in 2007.

That would be convenient, but Jobs did not say it was MPEG LA assembling a patent portfolio to go after the OGG family.

OGG poses no credible threat to H.264 and is not currently used by anyone with enough assets to make a lawsuit profitable. The business case for an OGG patent pool is to be in place when someone with deep pockets infringes.

I'd put my money on one of the patent holders that got solicited for a possible pool being an Apple friendly and tipping Apple off.

But back to the original article: Surely H.264 is a patent "mine field", but it is a mine field with a map. You buy your license and you are clear to go.

Absent from the article is any description of how the OGG developers performed some sort of systematic patent search by people knowledgeable in patent law and compared them against the various format specifications and current algorithms.

The developers not deliberately injecting patents isn't enough. You have to ensure you are not infringing all of them before you can use it if you are a target with deep pockets.

I'm against almost all patents, but the OGG response doesn't do anything to convince me that OGG is patent proof and the Apple/MPEG LA villainy talk is irrelevant.

Well, that minefield map for H.264 only shows what patent mines the MPEG LA has laid down. But when it comes to hidden patents, why assume that H.264 is any better than Theora?

The biggest companies in the video encoding industry, the ones with vast expertise in video patents, have a significant financial interest in making sure that no one else has a patent claim on their cash cow.

It's a lot like buying mob protection.

But it doesn't work -- look at how Microsoft got sued by Alcatel-Lucent after licensing MP3 from Fraunhofer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcatel-Lucent_v._Microsoft

Oh really? That wikipedia page says that Microsoft won on the MP3 related patents (on appeal), in part specifically because they had licensed MP3 technology from Fraunhofer's MP3 pool. (Getting your $1.5B damages dropped because you spent $16M on licenses is a terrific bargain too). The parts where Microsoft has lost are on user interface patents unrelated to MP3 coding.

Well, Google Chrome and Mozilla ship with theora, isn't that "big pocket" enough?

Mozilla isn't really that deep of a pocket considering the cost of a lawsuit and the likely winnings. If I were Google and were asked to license the patent pool, I'd just take out Theora support in the U.S..

Intellectual property legal threats kill competition and ingenuity. It is getting to a point where major corporations hold so many patents and intellectual property rights that the chances of other developer(s) potentially infringing on any one of thousands of held IP "rights" is seemingly likely. As an software developer I unfortunately do not have a retainer staff of IP lawyers available nor does the start-up company that I work for. Apple and other large IP holders use their IP as a weapon to drive off competition and kill ingenuity.

Developers in countries other than the United States have an advantage in that they do not have as much to worry about United States corporate legal threats.

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