Apple, Google, Facebook's AV1 standards group under EU antitrust investigation
reuters.com
reuters.com
What is the codec requires proprietary hardware only available from Apple, Google and the likes? Is it free or not really then?
This is unlike H.265, which requires patent license fees for every chip made.
H.265 requires three patent license fees, since two other competing patent pools promised a handful of patent owners a deal on cross-licensing if they left MPEG-LA.
AV1 may not require a patent license, because Google designs the codec to only use unpatented or royalty-free patented inventions. However, there's still considerations of submarine patents - i.e. an unrelated entity that invented the same technology before Google. Parallel reinvention is not a defense against patent infringement - there is no inverse to prior art. This is the same reason why Microsoft refused to support VP8/WebM early on in IE - patent pools were supposed to provide an incentive against that sort of trickery. Then Velos Media and Access Advance came along and broke this, which is why the naysayers started piling on into AOM.
>If the EU finds royalty-free patent ceasefire clauses to be anti-competitive, then the entire foundation of standards-based interoperability for the web is at stake
hmm, that sounds against
Followed by
>the entire realm of software encoding schemes has been poisoned by patent royalty schemes for far too long
well, that sounds for
but then
>I cannot think of anything worse for the state of media encoding on the web than regulator intervention to maintain that status quo
uh, against if they maintain status quo but for if they say it needs to change? Don't regulatory agencies normally look into things because they think they might need to say stuff needs to change?
on edit: changed ugh to uh, as ugh is generally used as expression of disgust, whereas I was going for expression of confusion.
> the entire realm of software encoding schemes has been poisoned by patent royalty schemes for far too long
That’s a statement against - not for. They’re saying the companies are doing a good thing and the EU trying to stop them is a bad thing.
> I cannot think of anything worse for the state of media encoding on the web than regulator intervention to maintain that status quo
Also a statement against - ‘can’t think of anything worse.’
(And they’re right.)
>the entire realm of software encoding schemes has been poisoned by patent royalty schemes for far too long
sounds like it's for, right? If it has been poisoned by patent royalty schemes, and regulators are looking at patent royalty schemes here they must be for?
Also
> I cannot think of anything worse for the state of media encoding on the web than regulator intervention to maintain that status quo
>I cannot think of anything worse
is against, but
>regulator intervention to maintain that status quo
I mean, regulator intervention generally happens upending status quo, because when regulator intervention happens it means you will regulate something that was not regulated and thus what was status quo under unregulated system will have to adjust, even though of course big companies often improve standing from regulator intervention because they have the resources to handle the regulations and after a period of transition may be doing even better than before it still is the case that generally regulator intervention upends the status quo.
on edit: I mean tone is also against, so I normally just go by that, just some of the words don't seem to be as against as I would think from the tone.
> the entire realm of software encoding schemes has been poisoned by patent royalty schemes for far too long
Apple, Google, Meta are forming an ANTI-patent royalty scheme.
The EU is trying to stop them.
Apple etc trying to do things differently, EU trying to maintain the awful status quo of patent wars.
ah ok, I guess that makes sense. I interpreted it otherwise because it is still using the patent system.
Yes using the system against itself.
No government serves the people. But especially not the EU. That is always the facade. This is an act of war against free standards.
Take German weather reporting for example. The tax financed weather service had a free app with weather warnings and weather forecasts. Without any tracking or advertising.
The commercial weather services sued it and where granted the ruling that forecasting of weather data payed by the taxpayers offered for free is forbidden as it hinders the commercial interests of the competition.
So either one pays for the app now or just has weather warnings in it.
Antitrust for the win (from the POV of the commercial entities).
The US follows a different tradition, wherein all works created by government employees are in the public duty [2].
Personally, I believe both ways of traditions are reasonable.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depublizieren
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_works_by_t...
I remember one such case with regards to Estonian air.
For those that don't know, estonian air was losing a _lot_ of money, but the Estonian government kept bailing them out. In fact it was considered the "cost of doing business" and took it as a form of investment in tourism.
Of course, this is still a private company, and subsidising the airline means that nobody can possibly compete at that price point.
So the EU ruling is sound, but the effect is that people are having a lot harder time getting to Estonia now.. which is a net loss for Estonia overall.
Saying the EU doesn't serve the people is a bit of a lie, but there are circumstances where the EU does something and a subset of people are worse off, even if it's a better idea.
Sounds like nearly every airline since airlines started.
“The quickest way to become a millionaire in the airline business is to start out as a billionaire.” - Branson
That surprises me. The data itself is open (https://www.dwd.de/EN/ourservices/opendata/opendata.html: “According to a change in the Deutscher Wetterdienst Act, which has come into effect on 25.7.17, the DWD has been given the legal mandate to make its weather and climate information available mostly free of charge”), and trivially retrieved from their server, for example from https://opendata.dwd.de/weather/text_forecasts/
I don’t remember the URL, but they also have a freely available GIS server that serves weather warnings that is easily used as a layer on top of OSM data.
I don’t know the details, but I think the issue is that raw data is free, but writing apps on top of it is left to the market. I don’t see any reason why there can’t be a free open source app that uses this data.
This means that any FOSS or free-as-in-beer weather apps must be funded out of a developer's own pocket, rather than as a public good.
I'd like to introduce you to a man named Leonardo Chiariglione - co-founder of MPEG, if not the entire concept of FRAND patent pools. He has a rather long blog post from 2018 detailing ISO's growing patent problems here: https://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solu...
The ending of this story is that Leonardo was fired or forced out about two years ago, and MPEG is dead - or, more accurately, cut into like five different pieces. There's a bunch of patent holders who are angry that patent revenues have fallen since the MPEG-2 days, angry that H.264 has zero-cost licensing for certain industries, and are deliberately trying to break the whole FRAND licensing system with conflicting H.265 patent pools to try and extort more money out of codec implementers. Leonardo tried to make ISO aware of this and several unnamed national entities vetoed him.
My conspiratorial guess is that one of those national entities is the EU, or perhaps ECMA[2]; being lobbied on by the same companies that gave us Velos Media and/or Access Advance. Those same people are probably whispering sweet nothings in the EU regulators' ears. "Look, Google is trying to use their market power to not pay for video codec patents![3] Ignore all the other sketchy stuff we're doing on the other end."
[0] ISO-speak for patents whose owners pledge to license them on a royalty-free basis
[1] ISO-speak for patents whose owners pledge to join a patent pool
[2] Can you tell I have limited knowledge of how ISO is organized?
[3] Leonardo himself actually also believes this and is arguably more opposed to AOM than the EU regulators are.
EDIT: I probably should also include another link to Leonardo's blog: https://blog.chiariglione.org/video-compression-patents-an-o...
“ The Commission has information that AOM and its members may be imposing licensing terms (mandatory royalty-free cross licensing) on innovators that were not a part of AOM at the time of the creation of the AV1 technical, but whose patents are deemed essential to (its) technical specifications," the paper said.
This concern is certainly valid, i. e. it is logically consistent. I would tend to agree with the sentiment that standardization is net-positive, but I know next to nothing about the commercial aspects happening behind the scenes of these processes.
In principle such a thing is problematic when the heavyweights get together and de-facto force others to sell at a low price. It is seen unfair as the big one finance this squeeze with profits from other markets where they but not the niche player gain.
Cross licensing is the whole point for creating a free (as in beer) standard body. There are too many existing patent in this field. If mandatory cross-licening is seen as a problem, it will be impossible to create new video standard.
I read that as an investigation on this (real or imaginary; that’s what the investigation is about) stream of events:
- AOM members created a standard for which they, together, thought owned all patents
- they found out that isn’t true. Other parties hold patent(s) that are essential for the standard.
- they strong-arm the holder(s) of those patent(s) to join AOM and, with it, license their patent royalty-free to the others in the group.
Whether it happened I wouldn’t know, but step 3 should, IMO, be illegal. Royalty-free cross licensing is more beneficial for those who have the capital to build millions of chips implementing the standard than for smaller players. It’s like a few elephants forcing a mouse to have dinner together and splitting the bill.
Well we are only a few years away from having patent free H.264.
If this antitrust investigation actually exists, the EU can properly get bent, and should stop shilling for the MPEG patent pool.
Mitchell Baker, the current CEO and the CEO during this whole thing, makes $3m/yr, yet Firefox userbase keeps shrinking due to management throwing the engineering team under the bus.
I think it is safe to say that, although Mozilla isn't a shell company for Google, Mitchell Baker might be a shell CEO on Google's payroll.
FTA: “…AOM and its members may be imposing licensing terms (mandatory royalty-free cross licensing) on innovators that were not a part of AOM at the time of the creation of the AV1 technical, but whose patents are deemed essential to (its) technical specifications," the paper said.”
This is no different than the GPLv3 anti-patent language, imo.
In theory, patent cross-licensing agreements should be designed to pool up patents covering the standard, so that every user of such standard could use it regardless of patent portfolio.
In practice, with large enough market share to push standards on end users standard consortium can develop a standard inherently infringing on patents held by non-members and use market domination to strong-arm non-members into either reducing presence while litigating or joining the cross-licensing agreement, effectively rendering patents held unenforceable.
From what it reads that is the issue: patent pools coupled with market dominance used to expand said patent pool.
Other commenters mention an orthogonal issue - cross-licensed patent pools as a tool to effectively eliminate software patents. However, this misses the main point raised by this probe - which companies emerge victorious and in this case (such cases) the founding members emerge on top due to pre-established market dominance.
"It is also querying companies on AV1's compatibility with other video codec standards, such as whether a smartphone or a browser can support both AV1/VP9 and competing codecs HEVC and VVC simultaneously."
"And if AV1 were to turn into a new market standard, the commission asked, what would be the impact on companies’ ability to compete with AV1’s AOM licensing conditions, and their incentives to work on alternative video codec technology that may be non-royalty free?"
"Brussels is trying to understand the rationale of companies that didn't choose AOM and instead have chosen to license the AV1 and VP9 standard-essential patents through Sisvel's pool."
At one point, copyleft was under fire on antitrust grounds, based on similar arguments. Fortunately that was defeated on the basis that it wasn't actually bad for consumers, quite the opposite in fact. Hopefully this attack will be defeated similarly.
Competition can be good for consumer if new format technically superiors can emerge. Might be harder if this market is locked by huge companies that don't want to pay and push an inferior but artificially free solution.
That's an argument, not my opinion, I don't know what to think about this issue.
Because all the members of AOM are posting insane profits including on their media part and media codec is an insignificant part of a smartphone price. Honestly the whole thing looks mostly like a play from big players to pay less on the encoding side. It’s mostly irrelevant to consumers.
Industry has had its chance and they choose to nickel and dime everyone to the degree that noone who uses HEVC can be sure they're not infringing someone's patent even if they've payed up every single patent pool.
AOM is others response to this ridiculous status quo, within the same pate t framework.
So if you don't hate the game, don't hate the new players, either.
Patents don't protect the little guy. They certainly don't help the individual inventor, even though protecting the inventor is always the given rationale.
(so, is the EU also saying that once a standard becomes big enough, every essential patent must be licenseable under terms the EU finds acceptable, even if the patent holder didn't agree to that beforehand or possibly even participate?)
Note that the EU isn't claiming that the standard itself is bad. They're saying the cross-licensing terms are anti-competitive. The cross-licensing may have made sense for major companies like Apple, Google and Meta but it significantly disadvantages smaller companies which may need to rely on their patent arsenal as a deterrent but also face economic pressure to adopt the standard.
This whole thing seems to be a breeding ground for submarine patents, where in the end nobody has an actual applicable patent to show but the thread of pulling one out of the hat is there to make things worse.
They have to join AOM if they want to use AV1 and they need to use AV1 if they want to be relevant because all the big players banded together and made that unavoidable. That’s the heart of the anticompetitive argument.
Most companies don’t exist to sue for patent infringement. They are not patent trolls. The point of competition law is that they should be able to do business without having to go to court with a conglomerate.
It is not cross-licensing agreement per se being investigated, but
1. the inherent absence of some patents required for the standard/implementation to function in initial patent pool 2. use of pre-established market dominance of founding members to limit non-member patent holders' ability to create competing standard and effectively strong-arming them to join.
A very similar issue has been raised against Microsoft in the antitrust case regarding iexplore. Iexplore has been deemed "good enough" default that market dominance of Windows with iexplore preinstalled as the default effectively strong-armed everyone involved to at least maintain compatibility with iexplore.
I guess this is the disconnect; AOMedia worked very hard during standardization to avoid infringing existing patents held by non-members. There is a very strong belief that Sisvel’s claims on AV1 are fundamentally invalid, and while that would be nice to prove in court, Sisvel’s members arent stupid enough to directly sue anyone that can seriously fight back. Thus, the terms to license the actually essential patents to at least limit the damage Sisvel can do.
Anyway VVC is already technologically superior for anyone that wants a competing standard. If it fails, that’s 100% on the behavior of HEVC patent holders, not because of AOMedia.
For example mp3 was mainly developed there. They hold many patents in the field of audio and video coding which obviously fund parts of the organization.
More recently, they established a new audio codec for Bluetooth LE under proprietary license which in my opinion does not have any advantages over OPUS.
At the same time not all of the criticism is fair because they are not a patent troll and anticompetitive in their license agreements.
I mean, i would understand if the "gatekeeper" stuff was pushed by countries/organizations that have little to no manufacturing prowess, but it's Europe we're talking about and there's no way that the EU doesn't understand what they're doing (unless...).
First, near as I can tell, they only claim you need a patent license if you distribute an encoder/decoder. MPEG-LA has claimed distributing encoded video needed a patent license as well, but backtracked on trying to charge for it.
Second, your agreement to license your own patents only covers Necessary Claims on the Implementation (both the specific implementation you're distributing and the reference.) Which by definition can't cover any future inventions, because if the implementation already infringed them then they aren't novel inventions. But it does explicitly claim to include IP you acquire in the future that applies.
Also, I think the intention is that the license you have to grant only covers implementations of AOMedia standards; if a VVC implementation or whatever also used your invention, that would probably need a separate license you could charge for.
That is correct. Source: I helped draft the license.
What makes you say that? I like having privacy and don't see how the EU is being harmful to me with its stance on it.
I oppose non-retractable technical measures which can be repurposed for total surveillance and information control.
He didn't say anything caring about other people's privacy or business competitiveness or other such lofty ideals.
There's a long list of consumer-friendly EU regulations that I like. I'm also very supportive of EU privacy protections. I think the only problem with them is that they're not aggressive enough.
I can't possibly support a union that wants technical censorship measures introduced while crowing that they are privacy focused.
And then there's the removal of the control point on the Apple App Store, which is admittedly bad for business but the best outcome for consumers as it allows them to control over billing in once place. The proposed outcome of opening the billing is corporate interest focused rather than customer focused and will only harm the latter.
And of course there's what they didn't bother to do. No one is perfect but some of the recent shifts are stupid and force an EU centric view on technology. This is the region that sold out all of its technical capacity (Philips, Nokia etc) without even blinking an eye on the regulation front and is now complaining when US tech companies step into the gap in the market they created. Hypocrisy is what it is.
I can't support a singular organisation which does so much good and so much stupid at the same time. It needs to be broken down into separate bodies as it's a monopoly itself.
Markets where the main rule is pre-established power are in the long run destructive to society.
Of course not everything large American tech companies do is bad, but if a large American tech company does something that seems even remotely fishy, it's safer to first assume that it's bad until proven otherwise.
The most popular existing codec AVC/H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 is owned by the MPEGLA group with ~5500 active patents[0] in its portfolio, and the royalty sharing agreements[1] involved are free in small volumes yet become expensive at scale. A multi-tier fee structure for both hardware OEMs (think like the MPEG-2 license fee on the raspberry pi) and video distributors (Netflix et al) exist, where several large tech companies decided to band together in order to create a codec which isn't at the mercy of paying these license fees.
However, Sisvel wants to make their case against AOMedia's goal of a widely distributed free codec and extract up to 32 cents per device[2] based on their pool of a couple hundred patents[3] for both VP9 and AV1 codecs. We'll likely see this go to court and possibly drawn out over a long stretch of time if FRAND terms aren't able to be agreed upon between these parties.
Having a uniform royalty-free standard would be a net win for everyone involved- chip designers can add in an AV1 encoder/decoder without paying a license fee, software companies can freely encode & distribute AV1 videos, and end users have access to free video editing tools that wouldn't need to pay MPEGLA/Sisvel either. The alternative is waiting for the patents to expire and continue rewarding the rent-seeking behavior of NPEs/holding companies created to extract value at every possible step.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Video_Coding#Patent_h...
[1] https://www.mpegla.com/wp-content/uploads/avcweb.pdf Slides 7 & 8
[2] https://www.sisvel.com/licensing-programs/audio-and-video-co...
[3] https://www.sisvel.com/licensing-programs/audio-and-video-co...
"Hi Europe, enjoy your low-res bitrate starved H264 stream, for eternity."
or for 30 years or so, after all HEVC patents expire and all of its rent seekers gave up on it.
Is this the EU alleging things on behalf of Fraunhofer?
This piece of news is fishy, or there is some rot to remove from EU bodies...
In contrast MPEG-LA uses it as an offensive tool (i.e. for protection racket). So I don't even see it as comparable in principle.
So those who try to make an offensive pool should be investigated, not AOM. Hopefully this will backfire to those trolls in a big way.
Both governments will get more money, customers will pay higher prices, tech giants will keep making money. Everyone wins, somehow.
During the Trump presidency the governing party constantly called for regulation of "Big Tech" and even quasi-nationalizing social media platforms over "first amendment" concerns (which don't apply to private companies).
By comparison the current US government seems fairly tame and anti-interventionist.
It's also strange you consider tariffs an equivalent of antitrust and consumer protection regulation. US tech wouldn't have to give the EU "more money" if it followed the laws and regulations of the market it wants to operate in. Considering how obstructionist US tech companies of any size have been when it comes to basics like data protection and privacy, I'd say the fines these companies have had to pay so far are actually too low.
As for whether the AV1 case is actually anti-competitive, that's for the investigation to determine. But using a market leader position to strongarm other companies into agreeing to terms that weaken their ability to defend themselves would definitely be an antitrust issue, if the investigation determines that is what is going on.
Is the strategy entirely defensive?
I mean more than half of HN never heard of SAP.