[whatwg] arrggghhh (or was it ogg)

[Michael Dale]

I don't know if that entirely true..

In Lucent Technologies, Inc. v. Gateway, Inc. for example:

"Lucent had not made any representations that its patents would be 
licensed through MPEG LA; to the contrary, Defendants such as Gateway 
were informed that they would need a license directly from Lucent. 
Moreover, the MPEG LA sublicensee agreement explicitly warns that the 
MPEG LA pool *does not necessarily include all the patents necessary to 
practice the technology and that sublicensee signs the agreement aware 
of such risks*. (Blackburn Dec. Ex. 20 §§ 4.2, 4.3.)"

I am not an "expert" who can claim anything to any certainty when it 
comes to submarine patents? ...My observation of the litigation history 
shows theora is "safer" to implement than mpeg la stuff.
metavid.ucsc.ed/blog has some more "observations" to that end ;)

michael dale
metavid.org


Jerason Banes wrote:
> If by "Corporate Blessed", you mean codecs like H.264, there's a very 
> simple answer to that. Nokia and Apple pay licensing fees to a company 
> called MPEG LA. MPEG LA indemnifies Nokia and Apple from patent 
> lawsuits over the use of MPEG-related codecs. Should anyone come 
> forward with a new patent, the MPEG LA will litigate the matter and/or 
> come to an agreement with the patent holder to license the patent on 
> behalf of their member companies.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264#Patent_licensing
>
> Thanks,
> Jerason Banes
>
> On Dec 12, 2007 7:15 AM, Joseph Daniel Zukiger < 
> joseph_daniel_zukiger at yahoo.com 
> <mailto:joseph_daniel_zukiger at yahoo.com>> wrote:
>
>     What guarantees do Apple, Nokia, et. al. offer that
>     their corporate-blessed containers/formats/codecs are
>     free from threat for (ergo) the rest of us? Are they
>     willing to make binding agreements to go to bat for
>     _us_ in court?
>
>