Guest post by Patent term calculation is complicated in the US because there are essentially two different systems and quite a few corner cases. Even with a list of patents, it can be tricky to determine when the patents are all expired. Since I am a computer programmer (and not a lawyer), I created a program to try and automate this. This paper discusses how patent term calculation works, and some results from a combination of hand and automatic term calculation for MP3, MPEG-2 and H.264.
US Patent Basics
Patents provide the owner of the patent with the right to exclude others from using, making and selling the patented invention (that is, if someone else makes, uses or sells the invention without permission, the patent owner can sue them). The goal of the patent system is to provide inventors an incentive to invent and publish their inventions. Whether and how well this works for software is subject to debate. There is debate if software in the US is patentable or not, but those are discussed elsewhere. Patents must be filed by no later than one year after the publication of a description of the invention (and putting implementing source code on a public website or ftp site counts as publication), otherwise they are invalid. Other restrictions on patents exist as well. After a certain period of time, the patents expire. Calculating when this happens is complicated because there are basically two systems, the first is the older one where patents lasted 17 years after the grant date, and the newer system where patents last 20 years after the earliest filing date. This will be explained more later.
Sources:
- http://www.uspto.gov/go/pac/doc/general/#novelty
- http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/35/154(a)(2).html
- http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/35/154(c).html
- http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/documents/2700_2701.htm#sect2701
- http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/documents/2100_2128.htm
- http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/documents/1400_1401.htm
The patent status of a particular standard can vary. For example, the Fortran 66 standard can almost certainly be implemented without infringing any patents, since the standard is so old that any essential patents have long since expired (improperly issued patents could exist so there is a low but non-zero probability of getting sued). On the other hand, MPEG-2 has many essential patents (according to MPEG-LA) so it cannot be implemented and used without either licensing the patents or infringing on them. For some standards, the patent owners have released their patent rights and allow anyone to implement the standard using the patents without infringement. An example of this is the Theora video compression standard where On2 has licensed their patents.
However, just because a specification can be implemented without infringing patents doesn’t mean that a particular implementation doesn’t infringe patents. To invent an example, say you make a Fortran 66 compiler that will take a MPEG-2 video, decode it and look for fortran code and compile that code. Despite the fact that you could make a Fortran 66 compiler without infringing any valid and unexpired patents, this bizarre implementation would infringe on any MPEG-2 patents.
Searching for US Patent and Trademark Office’s patent database will produce large numbers of patents for many queries. For example, searching for Class 375/240.16, which is Subject matter wherein a signal is produced which represents the spacial change of an image portion, produced 1066 patents. That is many more patents than I want to look at. Smarter searches could reduce this number based on other criteria such as filing date, but still most searches for patents will quickly return more patents than anyone can handle. Instead, I used the ITU’s and ISO’s patent databases and MPEG-LA’s and the companies own claims for patents on the standard. The ISO’s patent database misses patents that have successfully been sued over so it should not be relied upon. On the other hand, companies that claim that their patents cover a standard and then ask for licensing fees have a bias to try and claim that they own as many essential patents as possible. In my spot checks, it looks like some of the patents that companies are claiming cover the standard are essential, and some look like they only cover possible implementations of the standard. Because of this method of search, two types of errors exist, errors of including patents that are not required for implementing the standard and missing patents that are required for implementing the standard.
Determining Patent Term and Start
As stated before, there are two different patent terms. It used to be that US patent terms lasted 17 years from the grant date. After the Uruguay Round Agreements Act the term was switched to 20 years (plus any term adjustments) from the first filing date. Patents that had already been filed get the longer of the 17 year or 20 year term (which ever term would make the patent expire last). Therefore determing the patent term requires determining the earliest filing date, determing whether a 17 year term could apply and if it could, finding the grant date. Finding the grant date is simple, it is on the patent. Finding the earliest filing date can get tricky however because of international patents, patent continuations, patent divisions and reissued patents. If the patent is from a Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), then the earliest filing date is when the PCT patent was filed. If the patent is a continuation or division of a previous patent, then the filing date is from the earliest continuation or division. If the patent is a reissed patent, then the earliest filing date on the original patent needs to be determined. The earliest filing date is also the one that counts for determining prior art. In the US, the prior art needs to have been available to the public one year before the earliest filing date. Determining whether a 17 year patent term could apply requires looking at the filing date and the PCT filing date. Patents filed before June 8, 1995 last the longer of 20 years from the filing date or 17 years from the grant date. If a patent is continued or divided, then the new filing date is the key one, not the earliest filing date (so a patent can loose the ability to have a 17 year term, though the earliest filing date stays the same). I think that if a PCT patent has a continuation or division, the date for determining if a 17 year patent is available will change, but I am not sure (see [1] and [2]). If the patent takes too long going through the patent office, a patent term adjustment can be added, which increases the 20 year term. Patents can expire early if the renewal fees are not payed.
Sources:
- http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/documents/appxl_35_U_S_C_365.htm#usc35s365
- http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/documents/appxl_35_U_S_C_119.htm#usc35s119
- http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/documents/appxl_35_U_S_C_154.htm#usc35s154
- http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/documents/2700_2701.htm#sect2701
Patent Term Calculation Examples
Simple one first: US 6009399. [3] [4] Filed: 16 apr 1997 Granted: 28 dec 1999. No PCT, and no related US application data. It has no patent term adjustment. It is filed after June 8, 1995, so the term is just 20 years from the filing date, or 16 Apr 2017.
Two possible terms: US 4821260. [5] [6] Filed: 16 dec 1987 Granted: 11 apr 1989. No PCT, and no related US application data. It has no patent term adjustment. It is filed before June 8, 1995, so term is longer of 17 years from grant date, or 20 years from filing date. 17 years from grant date is 11 Apr 2006, and 20 years from filing date is 16 Dec 2007, so expiration is 16 Dec 2007.
PCT Example: US 5706309. [7] [8] Filed: 02 may 1995 Granted: 06 jan 1998. PCT Filed: 02 nov 1993. No related US Application data and no patent term adjustment. It is filed before June 8, 1995, so term longer of 17 years from grant date, or 20 years from earliest filing date. Since this is a PCT application, the earliest filing date is 2 Nov 1993, so the 20 year term is until 2 Nov 2013. The 17 year term ends on 6 Jan 2015, which is later so the the expiration is 6 Jan 2015.
Continuation Example: US 5321729. [9] [10] Filed: 26 apr 1993 Granted: 14 jun 1994 Continuation of application Ser. No. 07/718,402, filed Jun. 24, 1991, now abandoned. No PCT, and no patent term adjustment. Since this is a continuation, the earliest file date is 24 Jun 1991, so the 20 year term ends on 24 Jun 2011. The 17 year term ends 14 Jun 2011, so the later of those is the expiration date of 24 June 2011.
Term Extension Example: US 7826532. [11] [12] Filed: 03 mar 2005 Granted: 02 nov 2010 Division of of application Ser. No. 10/655,397 filed Sep. 5, 2003. No PCT. Patent term adjustment of 1546 days. Since this is a division, the earliest file date is 5 Sep 2003. The 20 year term should end on 5 Sep 2023, but because of the patent term adjustment of over 4 years, it instead expires on 29 Nov 2027.
Reissue Example: US RE39080. [13] [14] [15] [16] Reissue of US 5627938. Filed: 22 sep 1994 Granted: 06 may 1997 Continuation of Ser. No. 07/292,598 filed Dec. 30, 1988 now
abandoned. No PCT. No Patent term adjustment. The 20 year term should end on 30 Dec 2008, but 5627938 was filed early enough that the 17 year term also applies, which would expire 06 May 2014, so the patent expires 6 May 2014.
Bonus example: US 5924060. [17] [18] Filed: 20 mar 1997 Granted: 13 jul 1999. PCT filed: 29 Aug 1987. US 5924060 is a continuation of the abondoned PCT filing. If the PCT filing was able to grant a 17 year term, then this would expire in 13 Jul 2016. Based on my reading of the law, because the one filed with the PCT was abondoned, this instead expires at the end of the 20 year term which is 29 Aug 2007.
Automatic Term Calculation
In this report, most of the dates are calculated automatically with
the patent utilities that I wrote. They can be downloaded from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jrincayc/Patent_utils . Note
that they are not perfect, since the data is not always stored in a
structured way. Unfortunately, since there are 230 plus patents in
the H.264 pool, it would be very time consuming to check all the
patents. On the other hand, if I did the calculations by hand, I would
invariably make mistakes by doing them manually. Take the conclusions
with a grain of salt. My previous calculations were wrong, and other MP3 term calculations I have found online have mistakes as well.
Maximum Patent Term
Because of the way that patent terms were calculated, before June 8, 1995, it was possible to make a patent quite a while after prior art via divisions, continuations and other tricks. After the 1995 date, some times a patent term extension can be granted. Without patent term extension and various tricks, the patents expire 20 years after filing, and the patent cannot be filed any later than 1 year after a publication, so 21 years after a specification is created, it starts becoming patent free. Taking into account the ability to do things like continuation before 1995, and adding in the approximately three years to get through the system plus 17 years after grant, an alternative date to be reasonably confident of being patent free is 1995+3+17+1 or 2016 for specifications published before 1995.
MPEG-1 ISO/IEC 11172
MPEG-1
(wp) is a widely used
standard for compressing video and audio. The various parts of the
standard can be purchased from the
ISO
or ANSI (Part
1,
2,
3).
It is used for video cds and most DVD players can play these cds. MPEG-1 is a subset of
MPEG-2, so any complete MPEG-2 player can play MPEG-1 video and audio
as well. Both Microsoft Media Player
and Apple Quicktime play MPEG-1. There
are three different ways audio can be encoded in MPEG-1. The simplest
is layer 1,
layer 2 is more complicated and Layer 3 (also know as MP3) is the most
complex. A near
complete draft of MPEG-1 was created in September 1990 and the final
version of the decoding spec (ISO 11172-1,2,3) was published in
August 1993. The draft
standard was publicly available as
ISO CD 11172 by
December 6, 1991. Berkeley Plateau Multimedia Research Group created a
software MPEG-1 video decoder by November of 1992 (
Old versions download). Reference
encoders and decoders were published in 1998 by the
ISO
and the source code can be
downloaded.
The ISO has a patent database (Use the JCT1 one, and search for 11172) which lists one
MPEG-1
patent owned by the Compusonics Corporation, US 4,472,747, which
expired in 2003. So,
is MPEG-1 be implemented without worrying about infringing patents?
Nope. This brings us to the next section of MPEG-1 Layer 3 audio or MP3.
MP3
MP3 has
at least three separate companies that claim to have patents,
Alcatel-Lucent,
Thompson and
AudioMPEG. All
their claimed US MP3 patents are listed in the automatically generated
MP3 patent list. The last of these patents expires in April of
2017. If you only look at the MP3 patents filed before December 1992
(one year after the decoding spec was published), then the last
decoding patent expires in September of 2015. AudioMPEG claims that
their patents cover MPEG-1 layers 1,2 and 3. The other companies just
talk about Layer 3. So, at the minimum, fully decoding and encoding
MPEG-1 audio is patented.
The following table is a hand checked version of the list that appears at A Big list and What’s the current status
| Patent | Earliest File | Expiration Date | |
|---|---|---|---|
| PATENT | 5924060 | 1987/08/29 | 2007/08/29 |
| PATENT | 4821260 | 1987/12/16 | 2007/12/16 |
| PATENT | 4942607 | 1988/02/03 | 2008/02/03 |
| PATENT | 5214742 | 1990/01/26 | 2010/05/25 |
| PATENT | 5227990 | 1990/05/17 | 2010/07/13 |
| PATENT | 5321729 | 1991/06/24 | 2011/06/24 |
| PATENT | 5341457 | 1988/12/30 | 2011/08/23 |
| PATENT | 5384811 | 1990/10/08 | 2012/01/24 |
| PATENT | 5455833 | 1990/10/25 | 2012/10/03 |
| PATENT | 5559834 | 1992/10/06 | 2013/09/24 |
| PATENT | 5579430 | 1991/12/20 | 2013/11/26 |
| PATENT | RE39080 | 1988/12/30 | 2014/05/06 |
| PATENT | 5703999 | 1993/05/18 | 2014/12/30 |
| PATENT | 5706309 | 1993/11/02 | 2015/01/06 |
| PATENT | 5701346 | 1995/02/02 | 2015/02/02 |
| PATENT | 5736943 | 1994/07/08 | 2015/04/07 |
| PATENT | 5742735 | 1989/04/20 | 2015/04/21 |
| PATENT | 5812672 | 1992/10/13 | 2015/09/22 |
| PATENT | 6185539 | 1997/02/19 | 2017/02/19 |
| PATENT | 6009399 | 1997/04/16 | 2017/04/16 |
An automatically generated patent expiration list is available at MP3 Patent list
MPEG-2
An automatically generated patent expiration list is available at MPEG-2 Patent List. This list is generated from the MPEG-LA MPEG-2 list plus all the MP3 patents. MPEG-2 first came out in 1996. The last patent 7334248 expires in 2026, but it was first filed in 2002, so the initial MPEG-2 standard will count as prior art. Looking for patents that were filed in 1997 or before, 6181712 was filed in 1995, and does not expire until 2018, so 2018 might be a more reasonable date for MPEG-2 becoming patent free.
H.264
H.264 is a newer video codec. The standard first came out in 2003, but continues to evolve. An automatically generated patent expiration list is available at H.264 Patent List based on the MPEG-LA patent list. The last expiration is US 7826532 on 29 nov 2027 ( note that 7835443 is divisional, but the automated program missed that). US 7826532 was first filed in 05 sep 2003 and has an impressive 1546 day extension. It will be a while before H.264 is patent free.
Disclaimers
The author Josh Cogliati is not a lawyer, so if you are basing your multimillionaire dollar business on this, you are a fool. I am also a human, so there are almost certainly errors in this. As well, these are my own opinions, not my employer’s. Starting 30 days after this is published, this may be distributed verbatim, or may be modified and or distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
I think that my head just exploded.
That’s some great info, but it’s a bit of a brain overload. I’m very glad that I’m not a patent lawyer.
Yeah… definitely.
It’s a bunch of bullshit that just should not be a problem in the first place the way I see it.
Edited 2011-07-15 22:05 UTC
I agree that it was way too much work. Here are some of my opinions:
I have never seen a decent justification of why software patents should last 20+ years. I can see why things like medications should last 20 years, since FDA testing lasts so long, but software is quick to think up and quick to test (and quick for someone else to think up as well). I also think that software could get along fine without patents. If we are going to have software patents, they should last less than 5 years.
Software patents should have pseudo code or source code. Lack of this makes it far to hard to figure out what the patent actually covers.
There were far too many ways to game the system before 1995, allowing patents to last much longer than 20 years. If that wasn’t the case, MP3 would be patent free by the end of 2012 at the latest.
The US patent office should calculate a maximum patent term and put it in with the other patent information. Having to parse through English to figure out how long a patent lasts is ridiculous (My program uses several regular expressions to try and find out some of the information needed, and it fails for some of the more weird ways it is done).
There should be some way to mandate that patents that are essential for a standard are discovered. Right now, it is over 20 years since the MPEG-1 draft standard was created, and there is still enough uncertainty about MPEG-1 video to keep ppmtompeg out of distributions like OpenSUSE and Fedora. If something has been an ISO standard for five years, and you haven’t added your patent to the ISO patent database, it should be too late to sue.
IMHO all patents, hardware, software, medical, whatever, should have an automatic expiry five years after their first commercial application irrespective of what other timeframes are imposed, and none of this extending BS. If the new additions are significant enough to warranty an extension they should be patented separately.
I do believe the notion that software patents shouldn’t exist is misguided, but each to his / her own.
I’m not sure patents make sense. I don’t understand the logic of restricting ideas to a certain organization for an arbitrary time period. The whole thing seems kind of arbitrary.
The purpose of patents is to ensure that companies / individuals get a return on investment in research and development. Without patents, there is no motivation to invest in research and development if somebody else can take the results (without contributing to the cost of the R&D) and beat you to market with a competing product.
This makes sense when applied to physical products. When applied to things like software, genetics, business methods, etc. like it has been, it is no longer beneficial to the community as a whole, and simply turns into government sanctioned thuggery. I have no doubt that there should be protections in these areas as well, but they need to be separate from patent law, with different rules, limitations and means of litigation that are tailored to the specific fields and result in a the best positive and balanced outcome for both the companies and communities as a whole.
Or, to be more direct for the sake of brevity: patent trolls should strung up by their nuts.
> The purpose of patents is to ensure that companies / individuals get a return on investment in research and development.
Maybe. I think I get that. It might just be greed though. I’m not sure government needs to get involved in this.
> Without patents, there is no motivation to invest in research and development if somebody else can take the results
A patent proponent might say that, but then you’d say “pick any open source business to disprove that.” There is implicit benefit in being the innovator. Red Hat gives their code away, but Red Hat is still the expert of their code, and they are paid a premium for the business they build around that. So a counterexample. You don’t necessarily need patents to make money off new inventions. I’m left unsure of patents. Sanctioned thuggery is an interesting term.
so can i can install windows 95 on a few machines not probs 2016.
That is protected under copyright. You’ll be allowed to install windows 95 without worry sometime in the mid 22nd century, barring future copyright extensions ofcourse…
I’m confident copyrights will be extended another 20 years as soon as Mickey Mouse starts getting close to going into public domain. He’s the reason it got extended last time.
Well, more accurately things like WINE can re-implement windows 95 without it being likely there are patents. As Cody Evans mentioned Windows 95 itself is still copyrighted.
http://www.reactos.org/en/news_page_65.html
can’t forget ReactOS even if it doesn’t always work right it will probably work right before the 22 century
Well, HURD is getting close too, So I guess I can’t discount the possibility of a working ReactOS.
I am not really that concerned since we have Vorbis, Speex, Theora, VP8 and others which come very close and in many cases surpass the patented offerings. These are examples of the very best in engineering efforts, as evading patented technologies and still making a superior product is so complicated.
As for MPEG-2, how come a technology that has been standardised by ISO is patented? Maybe some parts of it have been omitted from the standard? Like particular algorithms, modes or encoding profiles. But why standardise an incomplete/limited/broken technology in the first place then?
I wouldn’t be so sure. All of those codecs can be attacked by submarine patents. There is no guarantee that Vorbis, Speex, Theora, VP8 are patent-free.
Submarine patents in their original meaning don’t exist anymore: These were patents that were filed, but hold outside public view and before the clock started ticking by extending the patent text all the time.
The “clock skew” was worked around by moving to first filing date (instead of grant date), making it unattractive for the patent holder to amend patents all the time.
And I guess/hope the PTO only grants extensions if _they_ mess up, not when the patent holder amends the text to incorporates new state of the art.
The current issue is with patents that apply to some technology that weren’t found on investigations, which eventually pop up.
For Vorbis a patent search was done by AOL before some subsidiary (Nullsoft, I think) was allowed to use it. While this is still no guarantee, it’s an indication that things aren’t all that bad.
Theora and VP8 are _not_ patent-free, but each has the known set of patents licensed freely.
As for unknown patents, even MP3 was hit by them. Sisvel/AudioMPEG showed up late and broke the single-shop approach of mp3licensing.com
The same could happen to MPEG-LA’s portfolio.
A holder of a matching patent could kill (eg.) h.264 by licensing their patent in a way that excludes parallel licensing from MPEG-LA.
This would also kill the value of that patent, but could be a strategic option, and there’s nothing MPEG-LA could do about it (except by trying to invalidate the patent).
This is why they (or any other licensor) won’t indemnify their licensees.
We need a term for this. I some times think these should be called iceberg patents since most of them are hidden and hard to find.
I think it would be entertaining to see what would happen if a holder of an essential H.264 patent required all implementations to be licensed by the GPL3 or another license that had similar patent provisions to the GPL3.
There’s no guarantee that any software is patent-free. Welcome to life, it doesn’t come with guarantees.
What makes you think that these formats are not covered by patents? Are you aware that the patent claims on JPEG only surfaced after the format had been in use for over fifteen years?
Some of these formats are indeed covered by patents. Google owns the patents.
Everybody worldwide has a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free zero cost license to use these fine replacement technologies.
As for possible patents held by other parties:
(1) For Vorbis and Theora, people have been screeching warnings for many years about possible patents held by other parties. None have come to light.
(2) As for VP8, apart from the patents owned now by Google … Google did a thorough patent search before the purchased On2 and hence the patents for VP8, and they found no other patents which apply.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/20/google_confident_on_vp8_and…
Today, when The Reg asked if VP8 was vulnerable to patent attack, Google product manager Mike Jazayeri indicated this isn’t a big concern for the company.
“We have done a pretty through analysis of VP8 and On2 Technologies prior to the acquisition and since then, and we are very confident with the technology and that’s why we’re open sourcing,” he said.
It was only because Google were very confident about the patent coverage of VP8 that they even bought the On2 company in the first place. It should also be pointed out that before Google bought On2, no-one had sued On2 over VP8 patents then, either.
MPEG LA made a call for other parties to submit patents they believe read on VP8
http://www.mpegla.com/main/pid/vp8/default.aspx
“initial submissions should be made by March 18, 2011”
This was a very risky thing to do, given the MPEG LA monopoly over H.264, because any party with an obscure patent that did read on VP8, one somehow missed by Google’s patent lawyers’ allegedly thorough search, should of course negotiate with Google first. I think MPEG LA are now under anti-trust investigation over this call.
Edited 2011-07-16 11:38 UTC
“standards” (even more so ISO standards like MPEG) are not “knowledge”, that must (or should, at least ideally) be accessible to anyone for free (thus, public domain)…
their point is merely interoperability between *industrial* products (say, between a factory made dvd player and a factory stamped dvd-video, or a professional tool that will be used to author the dvd itself)
it’s NOT to let *anyone* design and make his own thing possibily disregarding relevant parties that have a right to get their work compensated
and (most important, their intended) target is not the general public , it’s members of the industry who can afford to pay for other parties’ IP contained in their products (which becomes simply another item in the BOM)
OTOH nothing forbids one being a design-only firm, choose to work on algorithms alone, and yet retain the right to propose their own work as (/part of) industrial standards (it’s others’ choice to approve or follow them as such or not) and receive compensation for it..
welcome to the industry as it works..
Edited 2011-07-16 13:52 UTC
The only standards body that seems to care about creating freely-implementable standards is the W3C. Most other bodies either don’t care about patents or even prefer patentable solutions. The ISO is among the worst offenders in this area.
Aside from Vorbis, Speex, Theora and VP8 the “others” which you mention that may be useful are Dirac, FLAC and CELT.
FLAC is lossless, which is useful where storage space or bandwidth is not the prime concern, but quality is. Digital mastering is an application that comes to mind. The newest audio codec from Xiph.org is CELT, which is useful for Speech, VoIP, Low latency, Studio/transmitter link, wireless audio. Exactly the opposite scenario, where bandwidth and low latency are the primary considerations.
As far as I know, Vorbis, FLAC and CELT are actually the best codecs to use in each of the scenarios they are designed for. Vorbis is better than mp3, for example, FLAC is as good as any other lossless format, and CELT is as good as any other for low latency, low bandwidth application.
There has been a lot of argument over the comparitive performance of VP8 versus H.264, but when it first was released by Google out VP8 was very marginally behind the best H.264 encoder. VP8 however has twice been upgraded by Google since then, with approximately 6% performance improvements each time, and the third upgrade codenamed “Cayuga” is due out very soon now.
http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/03/next-up-libvpx-cayuga.html
One doesn’t lose anything (other than an obligation to pay royalties) by choosing to use unencumbered codecs.
Edited 2011-07-17 23:37 UTC
Well first of all claiming Theora is in anyway close the H.264? Sorry but you’re dreaming. You’ll need twice the filesize to get comparable picture quality. And frankly Ogg is a very badly designed container* with numerous problems.
Second if you think any of those are free of getting hit by the patent hammer? think again. Have you SEEN the MPEG-LA patents? we are talking about over 200 patents covering just about every stage of compression and decompression. They haven’t been hit by the hammer yet simply because they are a teeny tiny niche not worth chasing by MPEG-LA. If you were able to actually get the public (who frankly doesn’t care about this mess because their devices “just work” and that is all they care about) to use these codecs? they would spend the next decade in court.
That is why thinking you can geek around this stuff is simply a fallacy. the ONLY way to deal with this stuff is in the courts not in the lab. Sadly I doubt anyone in the know has enough money for the massive bribes it will take to get congress to do anything about it so things will only get worse. Of course the net result will be a major WIN for China and India who won’t play our little reindeer games and thus will still get to innovate while the corps in the USA go “where’s my check?”. All the rest of us can do is wait for the patent clock to run out, or in the case of copyrights hope our great great great grand-kids live long enough to see something actually enter the public domain again.
*-http://hardwarebug.org/2010/03/03/ogg-objections/“>Ogg
If the H.264 standard came out in 2003, how is it possible that a patent on it could last until 2027? At the latest, wouldn’t it expire in 2023?
Edited 2011-07-15 22:10 UTC
That is a good question, since it shouldn’t happen that way. However, as I explained in the article, US 7826532, filed in 2003 has a 1546 day extension. I haven’t checked how it managed to get an over 4 year extension.
http://patft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=7826532
http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=2onYAAAAEBAJ
“In 1997, five years after the lawsuit was decided, all lingering infringement questions against Microsoft regarding the Lisa and Macintosh GUI as well as Apple’s “QuickTime piracy” lawsuit against Microsoft were settled in direct negotiations.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corp…
God forbid, they should have settled it BEFORE it tied up the courts unnecessarily, and now things have gotten completely out of control.
So far, I’ve only skimmed the article and it looks like only US patents are covered. That’s a bit strange as the mp3 format was developed in Germany. Furthermore, Sisvel manages supposedly relevant European patents that are not part of any patent pool and is extremely aggressive about it.
I would love for someone to do the same thing for the European patents (and Japanese …), but as for me, it took enough time just to do the US patents. I think I have spent around a 100 hours figuring out the patent law, fiddling with the patent information grabbing code, getting the patents in a usable form, and writing the article. (This doesn’t count the time I spent writing the previous version before people on Wikipedia told me I needed fix my previous versions because I failed to take into account continuations and divisions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:MPEG-2#Patents )
One solution is simply to use Vorbis, Theora and WebM.
Everybody worldwide has a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free zero cost license to use these fine replacement technologies.
I agree that it is good to use Vorbis, Theora and WebM, but that still doesn’t help if the video you want to see is encoded in MPEG-2 or the audio you want to hear is encoded in MP3. Unlike the GIF format, both encoding and decoding of MP3, MPEG-2 and H.264 are patented.
Edited 2011-07-19 02:47 UTC
Users can help each other if they use Vorbis, Theora and WebM.
Fortunately there are free tools available to covert existing data into free formats. Here is an example:
http://www.mirovideoconverter.com/
I can’t tell you anything about the possible expectation to pay royalties for the tool itself, but once you have converted your data you can presumably get rid of the conversion tool and you are then home free from then on, as is anyone else you might want to share your multimedia files with (legal files, e.g. videos you took yourself). If your legit multimedia file is in WebM format, no-one has any legal claim over you. You are no longer constrained by what large corporations may want to restrict you to, for example you can copy your file wherever you please without DRM restrictions getting in your way.
Edited 2011-07-19 03:43 UTC
already exists. And yes, its patented. Amusingly enough, you could be violating the patent just by posting this article.
Based on the work you did to build your Patent Utilities, can you comment on how difficult it would be to build a service that could automatically report which patents were about to expire?
That depends on how accurate you want it to be. If you just wanted to use my patent library as it is, its probably less than a week of work.
I would think that that could be valuable information – to traders, biotech, etc. I wasn’t able to find anyone offering that info as a service. If you could build it in a week I think you might have an interesting startup! Not sure what the business model would be exactly but something along the lines of: Paid to get info early; Free to see what expired after the fact.
I would think that that could be valuable information – to traders, biotech, etc. I wasn’t able to find anyone offering that info as a service. If you could build it in a week I think you might have an interesting startup! Not sure what the business model would be exactly but something along the lines of: Paid to get info early; Free to see what expired after the fact.