Nokia sues Amazon, HP over video compression technology | Hacker News Reader

Nokia sues Amazon, HP over video compression technology

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Nokia must be desperate for cash. Developing video codecs is a painful exercise as some part of the implementation almost always relies on prior art. The company that I worked for were sued for our implementation of an MPEG-2 codec, because of a similar patent owned by a troll. These cases are what hold innovation back and are only attractive to the trolls because of how many h.264/h.265 codec instances are running out there. The usual technique is to go for the little guys first and then move up the food chain.

Given the patents were issued in '00s and they expire after 20 years it looks like the last chance to monetize them.

> The usual technique is to go for the little guys first and then move up the food chain.

Stating the obvious: That's hardly the case here.

I drew the opposite conclusion:

> The patents were at the center of a legal dispute involving Lenovo in 2020, in which the computer maker claimed Nokia did not fully disclose its intellectual property interest to the ITU and ISO while the bodies were working to standardize H.264. That lawsuit was settled one year later, with Lenovo and Nokia agreeing on a cross-licensing agreement.

That looks like patent trolling to me: sue someone who’s not really in the business and settle so when you sue a bigger player you can tell the judge that this other company did the right thing and paid for your incredibly critical technology.

I feel that's insulting towards judges in Delaware. Are you saying they are that dumb? (that's where the lawsuits were filed according to the article)

And most patent trolls are just a few jackass lawyers, not large established companies like Nokia.

The earlier victories won't have been reported.

Nokia going patent troll on small companies would not have gotten press? That is not very believable.

Please MS, do all of us a favour and erase it. The 5g hardware was their last chance to stay relevant.

What? What has it got to do with MS at all? They don't own Nokia.

> While Nokia's complaint against Amazon concerned streaming video, its complaint against HP involved the company's desktop and laptop computers, which allegedly contained the same proprietary H.264 and H.265 technology.

I have not read Nokia's brief, but that is particularly eyebrow raising.

Is Microsoft shipping h264 as a OEM MS Store app like they do for HEVC these days? Either that, or they must be shipping bloatware with AVC, otherwise it seems the buck would stop with Intel/AMD/Nvidia/Microsoft, not HP.

All this is just another nail in the coffin for VVC though. No one big enough to get sued wants to touch it with a 10 foot pole, and Nokia has justified the paranoia once again.

I thought that with patents, each entity among the manufacturing chain potentially needs a license? There is no analog for the first sale doctrine, or neither a requirement for consistent enforcement (as is there for trademarks).

> There is no analog for the first sale doctrine...

There is. It is called patent exhaustion. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaustion_doctrine_under_U.S....

There was a fad of issuing a "covenant not to sue" in lieu of a license, specifically to try to avoid triggering exhaustion, but courts seem to be (correctly, in my IANAL opinion) treating them as licenses anyway. See, e.g., https://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2013/01/3rd-circuit-covenan...

But isn't that easily avoided by suitably scoping the license grant?

I would not say "easily"... patent holders will absolutely try to avoid the effects of exhaustion by imposing post-sale or field-of-use restrictions, but lawsuits about it have gone to the Supreme Court, e.g., https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/553/617/ (and not worked out well for the patent holder).

As far as hardware decoding goes, I thought chipmakers paid the fee for everyone down the line?

Otherwise... thats pretty horrific. Would businesses using HP laptops en masse be exposed too?

Certainly not for everyone. Even if you buy professional videoconferencing equipment for business purposes, you do not get a patent license for its commercial use. Those paid offerings typically come with terms similar to the ones Cisco includes in their free Open264 builds:

THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR THE PERSONAL USE OF A CONSUMER OR OTHER USES IN WHICH IT DOES NOT RECEIVE REMUNERATION TO (i) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC STANDARD (“AVC VIDEO”) AND/OR (ii) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL ACTIVITY AND/OR WAS OBTAINED FROM A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO.

https://www.openh264.org/BINARY_LICENSE.txt

I'm not sure if if the relevant patent pools even have incoming licensing coverage for live Internet video because that arrived only after the pools had long been established.

"Did you know, for example, that content optimization on your device’s screen when switching between portrait and landscape video is a Nokia invention? And fast forwarding or rewinding a video by scrolling through it, while simultaneously displaying the current scene"

Sheesh, I should patent urinating after drinking a beverage, that’s about as novel of an invention.

As for fast forward and rewind while seeing the current scene, we did this back in the days of the VCR. Are they claiming to have invented that?

A VCR would simply display the frames that happened to pass by the read heads while rewinding.

When doing that digitally, your codec decides if that is even feasible. If the codec optimizes for disk space, generating any frame requires going through all previous frames. If the codec optimizes for fast scrubbing, the file must contain redundant information and thus be larger.

Nokia is claiming that h264's checkpointing mechanisms allow for that (empirically, this is indeed a feature of h264) and it is therefore their invention. I'm unaware if previous codecs had similar mechanisms. It would be wierd of none had, but it wouldn't surprise me that much.

> generating any frame requires going through all previous frames

No it doesn't; that would be crazy. There are keyframes that can be decoded independently of any other frame. They're usually every few seconds at most, which is fine for scrubbing.

MPEG2 has I, P, and B, frames, so unless they "refreshed" the patent is somehow old, someone at Nokia just came up with the scrubbing idea using the existing implementation.

...But video players have had scrubbing bars for a long time? I'm not sure how long, my memory on Windows on XP and older is fuzzy.

That is actually a direct quote lol

So afaik Nokia did not patent and enforce that.

Meanwhile e.g. Apple has very strongly enforced similarly silly UX patents. (E.g. rubberband/inertial scrolling and quite a few more.)

They have also very strongly enforced silly design patents - e.g. for rounded corners on physical devices.

Nokia is also a judge at the Unified Patent Court:

https://ffii.org/nokia-and-airbus-elected-as-judges-at-the-k...

This Court is a Kangaroo one.

That East Texas court comes to mind...

It's not perfect, but h264 is generally "pretty good", and presumably its patents should be expiring in the next few years. At that point, we will (hopefully) finally have a codec that's supported basically everywhere, has pretty decent "quality to size" ratio, and will cost nothing to license.

Of course, by that point I'm sure everyone will have moved onto HEVC or something, but a guy can dream of this utopia.

As I have been rambling about it for years. A truly patent free Video Codec that is good enough.

I also think we could innovate on top of it. Using certain techniques form JPEG-XL, ( Royalty free and not Patent encumbered ), breaking certain limitation it had like the size of macroblock. And lots of other limitation it had in place simply because hardware at the time wont fast enough.

This could push another 30%+ Bitrate reduction. As EVC Base Profile has shown to be possible.

Or we might do it the other way round and build a video codec based on JPEG XL.

I never finished it, but during a hackathon I did try and make a codec around FLIF (which more or less merged with/morphed into JPEG XL IIRC). I didn't get too far, but it was one of those things that I didn't really understand why no one else had done it.

So I think a codec based around JPEG-XL sounds cool. Someone should do it.

FWIW we currently have this in the AV1 codec which is royalty-free and has a better quality/size ratio than h264.

AV1 looks very cool but it doesn't have nearly the level of compatibility that H264 has. H264 works out of the box on browsers, as well as having hardware support on phones and SBCs and set-top-boxes and whatnot.

AV1 might eventually get there, and that would be awesome if it does, but H264 has been around long enough to have a substantial "first mover advantage" over AV1.

Last Raspberry doesnt have H264 decode hardware, wouldnt be surprised if that becomes a trend. A lot of SBCs only support up to 1080 on h264, 4k requires h265.

Yeah, I read that, though I think the latest Raspberry Pi might be fast enough to decode h264 in software so it might be a non-issue anyway; as long as it is fast enough I think I actually prefer software decoding just because (I think) it's more platform-independent.

I think I get your point though; if the Raspberry Pi is not adding chips for native H264 decoding, set top boxes and other SBCs might drop it as well.

Fair, but that's a matter of time it seems. I think AV1 is a good bet.

Yeah, no question; H264 had a 10+ year head start and entrenched itself as part of the Blu-ray and online video sharing space. Once AV1 has similarly-largely-scoped things then it'll probably take a lot of h264's market, and it'll be royalty-free from the get-go.

I definitely want AV1 to become the "video standard to rule them all", but once H264's patents expire I think I'm also ok with it being the standard as well.

On the patents of AV1 earlier this week in Hacker News

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38083588#38088009

TL;DR It’s neither patent free nor ”patent safe”.

Nokia's blog post about litigation:

https://www.nokia.com/blog/nokia-seeks-compensation-for-amaz...

Hopefully standardization committees in future will have learned to commit to open source, open licensing, mutual patent retaliation, or at least some method to prevent one defector from actually suing all the rest.

Does anyone know the "why now" for this litigation? I had a look at Nokia's own blog post about this, but it's unclear why they sat on this for years.

It was mentioned elsewhere in this thread that the patents were issued in the early 00s and were valid for 20 years, so they will be expiring soon.

Patents last for 20 years and these were granted in the mid 00’s. They’re milking the last drops out of their cow.

I am not a lawyer, so: even if a patent expires, that doesn't make patent violation commit in the past "not a crime anymore" does it? It's still subject to the statute of limitations?

And if they knew their patents were being violated but didn't sue, isn't there also the "sue's it or loose it" clause that can be invoked to get the case thrown out?

Presumably negotiations were going no where and they felt HP would never really settle it.

The hallmarks of a dying company... attempting to sue everyone until you become profitable. It worked out pretty well for SCO.

Software patents are dumb, no exceptions

Then again, I think IP is a bad paradigm that does more harm than good in general

nokia vs amazon u.s lawsuit document: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67928543/1/nokia-techno...

nokia vs hp u.s lawsuit document: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67928650/1/nokia-techno...

I think if you sit on your thumbs for 20 years while MPEG LA sell "your IP" without your permission, and in such a globally obvious way, you forfeit all right to that IP. Especially at the eleventh hour, like this. Especially when companies like Nokia are so used to the patent process. They have no excuse here.

Lenovo were idiots to settle. They fed the troll and now it's back.

Corporate death rattle.

wait this company is still alive?

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