Good news:
Today a court in Mannheim, Germany, ruled that VP8 does not infringe a patent owned and asserted by Nokia. This decision is an important and positive step towards the WebM Project’s ultimate goal: ensuring the web community has an open, high-quality, freely licensed video codec. Google’s intervention in the underlying lawsuit (Nokia v. HTC) was a strong show of support for open standards like VP8.
I guess they’ll have to dig out another patent somewhere to try and undermine Android, since Nokia isn’t having much luck competing with Android by, you know, actually selling stuff. How the mighty have fallen, huh?
http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/08/dutch-appeals-court-sides-with-n…
Judging by the text in the article the VP8 issue isn’t from the table yet.
Edited 2013-08-06 12:39 UTC
Nope, they’ve got more patents dug up. We’ll see how it goes.
Judging by FM’s text, seriously?
Well, I meant: there will probably be other cases with Nokia and VP8.
FM or not, I think is probably be correct.
I agree. Until Nokia is completely run into the ground, we’ll see more cases from them, and iirc they haven’t tried all their “vp8 patents” yet.
Nokia devices do not implement VP8. This would make Nokia suing anyone over VP8 a patent troll. Patent trolls haven’t been doing all that well in the courts lately.
IANAL, but … since Nokia has no VP8 product on the market, it seems to me they cannot easily claim any consequent damages from someone shipping a device which does feature a VP8 implementation.
Edited 2013-08-06 15:15 UTC
I believe they claim VP8 infringes on video patents. Nokia has products that do video (calls).
The claim and the reality are entirely different things, as we have already seen. MPEG LA (who do actually represent competing codecs that are used in cross-platfrom video calling) tried this already, and failed. Only then did Nokia pipe up, and Nokia too have now failed at their first attempt.
So Nokia have scurried around and now have had a second attempt at this claim, now with their lesser-likely patents.
You really, really think there is likely to be any claim of substance this time around?
Pfft.
It doesn’t matter if they are right in court.
MPEG-LA and Nokia just want to keep them in court as long as possible and try every trick they can.
What matters is they delay VP8 adoption and have a chance at winning.
Why do you think Nokia waited until the other thing got settled ?
If it works they’ll be really happy and can continue their H.264 (and older and newer) licensing tricks.
They will also delay the IETF process in the RTCWeb working group which deals with the mandatory video codecs in WebRTC.
Microsoft wants to support some form of WebRTC, but would really not like to support VP8 in their browser.
Apple also wouldn’t want to be forced to include VP8, but they are, like usual, mostly quiet about their plans.
Edited 2013-08-07 08:20 UTC
Their is no chance of “winning” here, everyone is totally aware of what is going on. Opponents have been trying to suppress VP8 for a number of years now, without success. VP8 clearly does not infringe on the patents of other parties, it is obvious to everyone. Nokia can try to troll all they want, but they can’t keep obstructing a free open codec that is clearly in the best interests of the entire public and expect to keep any loyalty amongst that same public.
Nokia didn’t falsely assert any patents against VP8 earlier, because they weren’t a MS patsy earlier. They only “waited” until such time as they demoted themselves to the status of Microsoft’s evil minions, and had to do as ordered.
If Microsoft really wants to support WebRTC they can do so right now, since it already is implemented (and it works) in Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Android. Even the code is freely available, what is to stop them?
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/06/webrtc-comes-to-firefox/
http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/16/chrome-29-beta-brings-webrtc-and-w…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aN0851GtND4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2HzZkd2A40
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ylct9mSFyAU
BTW, people who run Windows can already use WebRTC by installing either Chrome of Firefox. This particular cat is already well out of the bag.
Edited 2013-08-07 12:18 UTC
Yep, they know it, but strange court rulings happen all the time. And Nokia has these patents in 20 or more jurisdictions.
The general public really doesn’t know about these cases. It won’t influence sales much. What they “want” to sell Windows Phone, I doubt most people who buy Windows Phone care about patents or free codecs.
I think Nokia is like any company in decline, they’ll try anything. Maybe they are even payed by Microsoft for this, it’s possible. It wouldn’t be a first.
This is about what the eventual standard will look like, not what is already available. I’m certain they already have running code. They just want to bend the standard to something they like.
Thom,
You draw a long bow in trying to connect this with Android, VP8 is a video codec and is hardly something that gives Google an leverage as to whether a customer chooses an Android or WinPho based device. If it was Microsoft would add it tomorrow.
It’s a way to get devices banned. A small infringement, et voila, you can ban a device (well, unless Obama steps in, of course). Sadly, that’s how this works.
On top of that, there’s the issue of raising the costs of Android for OEM. Apple, Microsoft, and Nokia benefit from raising the licensing costs for Android to make Android phones more expensive for consumers.
It’s the other way around, Android gives Google a leverage to promote VP8. If someone doesn’t want VP8 to succeed, they sue vendors so they become reluctant to include it in their ROMs. If someone just wants to sue a vendor, VP8, being a complex piece of software, gives more opportunities to throw in some patents.
Edited 2013-08-06 13:52 UTC
In the mobile world, VP8 is embedded in hardware (ARM SoCs).
http://wiki.webmproject.org/hardware/arm-socs
The latest ARM SoCs, except those from Apple, Qualcomm and Sony, implement VP8 in hardware.
This is due to the fact that VP8 is one of the core media formats within the Android Multimedia Framework:
http://developer.android.com/guide/appendix/media-formats.html
If an OEM wants to advertise compliant “Android” from version 2.3 onwards, then their platform must include VP8.
If an OEM implements VP8 in hardware, then an owner of a software patent is out of luck, since patents do not cover the “idea” of an invention, but rather the “method” of implementing an invention. Hardware is not the same method as software.
Edited 2013-08-06 14:42 UTC
VP8 is a core media format in the Android Multimedia Framework, and it has been since version 2.3 of Android. VP8 is not a capability of either Microsoft nor Apple’s mobile platforms.
http://developer.android.com/guide/appendix/media-formats.html
Recently, the W3C consortium has been trying to standardise the WebRTC standard. WebRTC would allow browser-to-browser video calls, and hence would be in competition with Skype and facetime.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebRTC
The proposed video codec for WebRTC is VP8. WebRTC would therefore currently work in Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Android, but not on Microsoft or Apple mobile platforms.
This is the whole reason why MS patsy Nokia piped up about VP8 in the first place, just after Google had finalised a deal with MPEG LA. The whole point was to try to stymie the WebRTC standard.
Edited 2013-08-06 15:02 UTC
It would be rather stupid not trying to protect the rights you have or may have / demand fees you could get.
By doing the exact reverse and opening their VP8 codec with a free open source license, Google will end up deriving many thousands of times more business return out of their IP in VP8 than Nokia will ever derive from any of their video codec IP.
Edited 2013-08-08 09:04 UTC