

Lead OGG Dev Responds to Jobs Jibes - alexkay
http://blog.ibeentoubuntu.com/2010/05/lead-ogg-dev-responds-to-jobs-jibes.html

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mbrubeck
See also Monty Montgomery (original author of Ogg and founder of Xiph.org)
commenting on this Slashdot post:

[http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/04/30/237238/Steve-Jobs-
Hin...](http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/04/30/237238/Steve-Jobs-Hints-At-
Theora-Lawsuit)

\----

"Thomson Multimedia made their first veiled patent threats against Vorbis
almost ten years ago. MPEG-LA has been rumbling for the past few years. Maybe
this time it will actually come to something, but it hasn't yet. I'll get
worried when the lawyers advise me to; i.e., not yet.

"The MPEG-LA has insinuated for some time that it is impossible to build any
video codec without infringing on at least some of their patents. That is,
they assert they have a monopoly on all digital video compression technology,
period, and it is illegal to even attempt to compete with them. Of course,
they've been careful not to say quite exactly that."

------
othermaciej
It looks like this poster does not know the difference between Christopher
"Monty" Montgomery (aka xiphmont) and Gregory Maxwell. While Gregory is a
prominent Ogg developer, Monty is the one who designed the Ogg container and
the Vorbis audio format, the lead developer of most things Oggish, and the one
who engaged in a recent debate about the quality of the Ogg container.

~~~
mukyu
To be fair gmaxwell has been defending ogg as a container format on lwn, but I
am not aware of him writing a dissertation on it.

------
Entlin
Of course Jobs' answer is pure FUD. The MPEG LA and its Members (e.g. Apple)
should either sue or shut up.

~~~
jws
That would be convenient, but Jobs did not say it was MPEG LA assembling a
patent portfolio to go after the OGG family.

OGG poses no credible threat to H.264 and is not currently used by anyone with
enough assets to make a lawsuit profitable. The business case for an OGG
patent pool is to be in place when someone with deep pockets infringes.

I'd put my money on one of the patent holders that got solicited for a
possible pool being an Apple friendly and tipping Apple off.

But back to the original article: Surely H.264 is a patent "mine field", but
it is a mine field with a map. You buy your license and you are clear to go.

Absent from the article is any description of how the OGG developers performed
some sort of systematic patent search by people knowledgeable in patent law
and compared them against the various format specifications and current
algorithms.

The developers not deliberately injecting patents isn't enough. You have to
ensure you are not infringing _all_ of them before you can use it if you are a
target with deep pockets.

I'm against almost all patents, but the OGG response doesn't do anything to
convince me that OGG is patent proof and the Apple/MPEG LA villainy talk is
irrelevant.

~~~
CUViper
Well, that minefield map for H.264 only shows what patent mines the MPEG LA
has laid down. But when it comes to hidden patents, why assume that H.264 is
any better than Theora?

~~~
jws
The biggest companies in the video encoding industry, the ones with vast
expertise in video patents, have a significant financial interest in making
sure that no one else has a patent claim on their cash cow.

It's a lot like buying mob protection.

~~~
nitrogen
But it doesn't work -- look at how Microsoft got sued by Alcatel-Lucent after
licensing MP3 from Fraunhofer.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcatel-Lucent_v._Microsoft>

~~~
jws
Oh really? That wikipedia page says that Microsoft won on the MP3 related
patents (on appeal), in part specifically because they _had_ licensed MP3
technology from Fraunhofer's MP3 pool. (Getting your $1.5B damages dropped
because you spent $16M on licenses is a terrific bargain too). The parts where
Microsoft has lost are on user interface patents unrelated to MP3 coding.

------
mrinterweb
Intellectual property legal threats kill competition and ingenuity. It is
getting to a point where major corporations hold so many patents and
intellectual property rights that the chances of other developer(s)
potentially infringing on any one of thousands of held IP "rights" is
seemingly likely. As an software developer I unfortunately do not have a
retainer staff of IP lawyers available nor does the start-up company that I
work for. Apple and other large IP holders use their IP as a weapon to drive
off competition and kill ingenuity.

Developers in countries other than the United States have an advantage in that
they do not have as much to worry about United States corporate legal threats.

