Comment by kmeisthax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kmeisthax | Hacker News Reader

> The patents are referred to as Standards Essential Patents, or SEPs. Because of this arrangement, a vendor like Nordic probably can’t open source their modem firmware even if they wanted to.

Why would a SEP license forbid publishing modem firmware? The IP[0] involved with the modem firmware is copyrighted and trade secret material; publishing the firmware does not (and cannot) grant a patent license to those licensed standards-essential patents. It only imperils your implementation of the modem firmware, not the whole patent spec.

To wit, Cisco publishes an H.264 codec with BSD-licensed code, even though H.264 is under a shitload of patents that they are licensing. OpenH264 does ship with an additional patent sublicense that applies if you are using their build and installing it in a specific way, but that is particular to MPEG-LA's licensing structure[1]. Publishing an implementation of a patent you are licensing does not automatically sublicense the patent.

[0] Laws that grant the ability to dictate the conduct of your competitors

[1] Cisco is abusing(?) the MPEG-LA royalty fee cap to shield FOSS entities from having to take a license, basically, by paying for them.

> Why would a SEP license forbid publishing modem firmware?

Contracts and money.

> The IP[0] involved with the modem firmware is copyrighted and trade secret material; publishing the firmware does not (and cannot) grant a patent license to those licensed standards-essential patents. It only imperils your implementation of the modem firmware, not the whole patent spec.

Publishing the source to the firmware would allow people to make use of patented tech without paying for it even though it would be illegal to do so. Also, your license may simply stipulate that you cannot publish or share your code in anyway outside the company.

> To wit, Cisco publishes an H.264 codec with BSD-licensed code, even though H.264 is under a shitload of patents that they are licensing. > Cisco is abusing(?) the MPEG-LA royalty fee cap to shield FOSS entities from having to take a license, basically, by paying for them.

As you point out here, Cisco is paying for it. They publish open code, and to ensure the LA doesn't come after them, they're paying additional money.

There's also the possibility of trade secrets being involved. An example hypothetical: Maybe Qualcomm has tons of lab data showing signal performance and integrity for any given channel, band, power level, general environment (urban, suburban, rural), device position, device altitude, etc.

You might want to use that data, and algorithms derived from it, to improve your device's battery life. That data obviously cannot be patented, and while the lab data would be copyrighted and not part of the finished product, Qualcomm would understandably be mighty particular about any open-source code implementing the conclusions.

MPEG-LA also explicitly used to (I do not know current state) consider open source "some assembly required" releases to be non-infringing.

It was product incorporating the patented tech, i.e. ready to use binaries, that required licensing.

Cisco paid the licensing fees to enable easily downloadable h.264 codec for certain projects, but you could legally build it from source yourself.

IIRC h.265 had similar licensing

Exactly.

Cisco is paying for the binary provided. Not the source code. There are plenty of patented and open source. Every H.264, H.265, H.266 Encoder and Decoder in existence and used.

There are also plenty of open source 4G and 5G software implementation.

I sometimes wonder if I should just give up the fight for patent misinformation. On HN it is very binary, either good or bad. And all patents and Ads are evil.

I suspect a big reason is that there’s middleware: some of this stuff is so complex, that like video games, there’s probably a cottage industry of companies selling partially implemented bits and pieces, or licensing across companies of source code, or companies only licensing the patents if you agree to never release code. There’s also the IP angle: if you do manage to figure it out, there’s no honor helping Huawei.

> I suspect a big reason is that there’s middleware

I’d bet it’s simpler. Saying “yes” to the ‘can we share this outside of this company?’ Question means a lot of work and meetings and red tape and somebody is going to have to rope in legal and … and … and …

Or, “no, get back to work”.

True, but who owns most of the patents? Some of the most litigious companies on earth (Qualcomm, Broadcom, Cisco). How many legal cases are more expensive than patent litigation?

Also, it’s very simple: Imagine you approach Qualcomm. The script probably goes something like this:

“Sure, we’ll license you that patent, for $0.92 per device, a $25K per month maintenance fee, and compliance with our terms and conditions - chiefly, don’t license this patent to anyone else, and don’t share the source code of your implementation.”

I honestly just figured it was spectrum licensing. You can’t sell devices that can broadcast at power on just any old frequency. At a hardware level these modems are capable of going well outside the bounds of mobile device regulations. See all the ‘turn xyz into a software defined radio’ hacks that have been done before on other devices on the market.

So the firmware is locked down. To do otherwise will break spectrum licensing as the device then becomes capable of doing things outside the original licensed purpose.

That's probably it, the FCC won't let you sell a device that has a user-accessible method to violate wireless regulations. At most, they could release the source code but not the signing keys so end-users could inspect but not change the firmware.

Wouldn't the FCC come into play at a later level? We're talking about providing source code to device developers, not end users. As long as the device developers ensure the products they release are locked down, the FCC shouldn't care about it - they only look at the final product as sold to end users.

Both the modem module and the device incorporating the modem module have to be FCC licensed. When I said "FCC won't let you sell a device that has a user-accessible method to violate wireless regulations", I was referring to the modem company selling the modem module to device developers. Sorry for being unclear there.

I'm not too keen on this topic, but router firmware usually asked YOU, what country you (it, the router) resides in to allow or block additional frequencies. No source required.

And then Intel still goes and makes their "automatic geolocation for frequency policy based on neighboring APs" mechanism the default and only policy in their wireless Wi-Fi drivers.

I assume that you're outside of US. Outside of professional FCC-licensed-per-AP equipment, no, you cannot. There is a reason why OpenWRT has a weird limitation on some routers where an EU model is perfectly okay while simultaneously not working with a US model.

> So the firmware is locked down. To do otherwise will break spectrum licensing as the device then becomes capable of doing things outside the original licensed purpose.

So what. Take pretty much any older transceiver, swap out the quartz(es) and suddenly what used to be a ham radio can now communicate with police radios, or a commercial radio can be converted for ham use.

Yes, of course the former case is illegal and the latter legal as long as you don't transmit without a callsign and a ham license. But still, radio manufacturers were not required to stop people from doing such mods - to the contrary, up until the 90s it was commonplace to have detailed schematics and BOMs in radios, and it was just as commonplace for people to mod their radios.

I don't get why the FCC is putting up so much pressure on locking down devices ffs.

The FCC generally requires finished devices aimed at the commercial market to be locked down from arbitrary modification. See 47 CFR 15.212(a)(2)(iv) ( https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/part-15#p-15.212(a)(2)... ) As far as I can tell, that basically applies to any transmitter intended for market use.

You have a similar requirement for DFS handling on 5-7Ghz wifi as well, specifically for radar detection and transmission disable when an operating radar is detected: 47 CFR 15.407(i)(1) ( https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/part-15#p-15.407(i)(1) ) -- This version of the requirement is what triggered the wifi aps lockdown issues back in 2016.

The communicated view of the FCC is generally that devices that easily permit operation outside the 'licensed boundaries' essentially become radio nuisances. A plurality of vendors will then essentially act aggressively to lock down their devices. If they don't, the FCC will and has leveraged the FTC to prevent import and impound shipping of such devices. Some other nations do something similar as well.

All that is probably ripe for a Chevron challenge, but even if you have a case that could win in court, taking the FCC to court is fraught, at best. It's definitely not for the faint of heart. In the case of big companies and vendors, where most of the IP for 4G/LTE/5G lives anyway, it would be pretty strictly a commercial mistake to pick that fight.

As for the political reasons they do it, it boils down to funding and the political fights that produced the system of auctioned spectrum and gatekept spectrum we have today. Tearing some of that system down is more likely to succeed. I have no idea what the second and third order effects of that would be though.

Middleware certainly seems plausible; see also the state of x86 UEFI firmware, which is basically just one company (AMI) selling customized firmware outside of the FOSS coreboot/libreboot world. With how complicated most cellular standards are, I imagine a lot of modem firmware is just one company we've never heard of selling a basic implementation that gets customized for each modem vendor.

Keeping the implementation secret as a condition of licensing the patent is not entirely unimaginable. It would be, however, very, very stupid (if you aren't outright evil), and not provide any extra licensing rents to the SEP holders. In the video world they don't do this; because everyone expects that anyone actually shipping a codec is going to pay[0].

But then again this is also cellular firmware; implementing standards owned by Qualcomm. And Qualcomm loves pushing the boundaries of how anticompetitive you can be with legal monopolies before actually violating competition law. They're the ones that saddled the US with "CDMA" "standards"[1] that put half of America's carriers on incompatible networks with phones you couldn't migrate to other networks. (Even other CDMA networks!) If Qualcomm had their way, they'd own LTE and 5G lock, stock, and barrel with the only modems you can buy being buried in a Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC.

[0] That's not to say that video SEP owners are particularly happy right now. The head of MPEG insists he was sacked for, among other things, complaining about MPEG's inability to standardize a royalty-free codec under ISO's patent disclosure rules.

[1] Including a competing standards body to 3GPP called, I shit you not, 3GPP2.

Yes, this is precisely what happens. There are decent sized companies, such as Etherstack, who exist to develop and sell wireless protocol stacks to OEMs.

https://www.etherstack.com/

Nordic probably doesn't own all of the code, which is a separate issue to the patents.

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