video codec patent nonsense [LWN.net]

video codec patent nonsense

Posted Apr 10, 2008 16:07 UTC (Thu) by DonDiego (subscriber, #24141)
In reply to: video codec patent nonsense by gmaxwell
Parent article: Video forums for free software

Ugh. I'm getting fed up seeing this outrageous FUD repeated over and over again. Mostly by you, Mr. Biurrun. It's clear to me that you are far too deep into propritary codec advocacy for anything I say to leave an impression.

I can assure you, Mr Gregory Maxwell, that the feeling is mutual. However, please note that I am not advocating anything, much less proprietary codecs. I am pointing out that the emperor has no clothes.

Intentionally unencumbered codecs like Dirac and Theora are either free from known patents or have had the known patents licensed for perpetual royalty free use by everyone. They have received a reasonable level of scrutiny by their authors and others, since being unencumbered is a serious part of the purpose of these codecs.

Sorry, this is just a blanket statement, not proof. Where is the reasonable level of scrutiny documented? This is nothing personal. I just like getting some backup to hard-to-believe statements.

What makes you so confident about Dirac anyway? It is very recent, so there are a large number of patents that it will not predate. Also, the field of Wavelet coding is heavily patented...

If anyone is aware of a specific likely-valid patent that covers either of these formats please speak up so that it can be avoided.

What makes you so confident that such a hypothetical patent might not be so broad as to be impossible to avoid?

Like the known-encumbered formats it is possible that there exists some submarine patents for Theora and Dirac. In comparing two items it is unreasonable to fault one side for a risk which is common to both.

Sure, but you explicitly claim that no patents on Theora exist when you speak of "patent-free codecs" and similar things.

Some even argue that the unencumbered formats will necessarily be less subject to less risk from even the unknown patents because patent problem avoidance was an important goal, and because submarine patents tend to be fairly broad which would result in a Dirac submarine patent likely also impacting H.264.

I assume you meant "less subject to risk" and not "less subject to less risk" above. Either way, you are in firmly hypothetical territory now. Hearing some people argue for something is quite the opposite of hard facts.

No, this would not help at all. If such a patent surfaces, I'm screwed. Dirac or H.264 would not make a difference. Possibly I would be even more screwed if I was never expecting to run into patent problems.

In any case, the world is paying many millions of dollars a year to licenses things like AAC, H.264, and MP3 encoders. These fees have *no equal* for Dirac, Theora, and friends.

Correct. And this is quite something. You should clearly state this instead of pretending that you have something you do not have. Then we would have no need to argue here.

I think it is very unfortunate that so many people in the various "open media software" communities are spending so much of their time on known-encumbered formats and ignoring the problems until the summons shows up on their doorstep.

What sort of summons are you expecting? So far everybody has been leading quite a quiet life while hacking, reverse engineering, infringing all sorts of patents and doing things that are claimed to get you into jail immediately. The only times when things really got to the courts was CSS decryption. We won fair and square.

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video codec patent nonsense

Posted Apr 15, 2008 2:57 UTC (Tue) by gmaxwell (subscriber, #30048) [Link]

I'd hate to flood the threat after already saying so much, so I'll just speak again to make this small point of correction:

The only times when things really got to the courts was CSS decryption. We won fair and square.

CSS wasn't patented. It was a trade secret, precluding it from patent protection. Any litigation related to CSS would be about anti-circumvention or copyright, but certainly not patents, so it's an entirely orthogonal matter.

More interesting to me is that in the US the only court case related to CSS of which I am aware is Universal City Studios, Inc. et al v. Reimerdes, Corley and Kazan, and not only was there no "we won" in that case, legally it was a total and unmitigated failure. Plaintiffs were demanded to not distribute CSS and not link to anyone distributing it and it was upheld by a US federal appellate court, so the ruling is precedential.

Of course, since CSS was a weak protection scheme which ultimately depended on secrecy for its security, once that particular horse was out of the barn attempting to suppress further redistribution was futile. The same situation simply doesn't exist for encumbered codecs, the licensing of which continues to generate millions in income even though their specifications are publicly available. While someone may well get away with distributing a geek-ware movie player including H.264, or bittorrent distributing bunches of illicitly copied movies in a format with per-use fees, plenty of other people won't. Helping these people is not the primary motivation for free codecs. The medium-sized band or independent movie maker trying to make it big shouldn't have to pay what amounts to a codec tax to distribute their works..., but they do because they aren't judgment-proof and the risk of not playing along is too great. If you don't think Theora or Dirac go far enough I invite you to help out.

Cheers.

video codec patent nonsense

Posted Apr 16, 2008 10:30 UTC (Wed) by DonDiego (subscriber, #24141) [Link]

I was making a somewhat more general point, sorry for being unclear.  It is always claimed
that multimedia hackers will get in all sorts of legal troubles due to patent infringement,
reverse engineering and whatnot. Contrary to the FUD, this has never been the case.

The only cases that actually went to court were related to CSS.  However, DVD Jon won fair and
square.  I actually forgot about the case you mentioned, but later there was Bunner and
Pavlovich and this one went well:

http://w2.eff.org/IP/Video/DVDCCA_case/

This is not about "getting away with geek-ware".  VLC is the single most successful free
software application next to Firefox.  I see it on every Windows desktop I encounter.  And it
is so much better than any of its proprietary alternatives that only play DVDs or a small
subset of codecs.

The use cases you describe are valid, but they cover perhaps 1% of the people using multimedia
software.  The vast majority are private people that will never get into trouble for using
libdvdcss to watch their DVDs or for encoding their wedding videos in H.264.