decoration decoration
Stories

GROKLAW
When you want to know more...
decoration
For layout only
Home
Archives
Site Map
Search
About Groklaw
Awards
Legal Research
Timelines
ApplevSamsung
ApplevSamsung p.2
ArchiveExplorer
Autozone
Bilski
Cases
Cast: Lawyers
Comes v. MS
Contracts/Documents
Courts
DRM
Gordon v MS
GPL
Grokdoc
HTML How To
IPI v RH
IV v. Google
Legal Docs
Lodsys
MS Litigations
MSvB&N
News Picks
Novell v. MS
Novell-MS Deal
ODF/OOXML
OOXML Appeals
OraclevGoogle
Patents
ProjectMonterey
Psystar
Quote Database
Red Hat v SCO
Salus Book
SCEA v Hotz
SCO Appeals
SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Financials
SCO Overview
SCO v IBM
SCO v Novell
SCO:Soup2Nuts
SCOsource
Sean Daly
Software Patents
Switch to Linux
Transcripts
Unix Books

Gear

Groklaw Gear

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


You won't find me on Facebook


Donate

Donate Paypal


No Legal Advice

The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

Here's Groklaw's comments policy.


What's New

STORIES
No new stories

COMMENTS last 48 hrs
No new comments


Sponsors

Hosting:
hosted by ibiblio

On servers donated to ibiblio by AMD.

Webmaster
vlc.h | 397 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Could the judge and the US Government become complicit?
Authored by: symbolset on Sunday, November 18 2012 @ 02:34 PM EST
Yes, the purpose of MPEG LA is to restrict the use of compressed video - an
essential modern technology - to the use of its members exclusively. Hence the
statement "We don't believe you can do video without taking a license from us."

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Could the judge and the US Government become complicit?
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, November 18 2012 @ 02:40 PM EST
The competition of Flash video and all the other competitive video technologies has been killed by Apple's exclusionary conduct and Microsoft want to make the exclusion complete ...
Adobe's reaction was to rapidly phase out the ON8 codec and use H264 within the Flash framework. After all it was an ITU/ISO standard...

Microsoft's explanation of their move to h264 for IE9 referred to the MPEG-LA allowance for free licensing [pdf] of the codecs for viewing AVC/H264 content that was free of charge to viewers on the internet. Note this document states that it is a "corrected version". Microsoft's explanation claimed that the viewing was free "on licensed platforms like Windows". Who knows if this was deception or ignorance.

ISO/IEC STANDARD 14496-10
Second edition 2004-10-01
Information technology — Coding of audio-visual objects —
Part 10: Advanced Video Coding

[p.viii] This part of ISO/IEC 14496 is technically aligned with ITU-T Rec. H.264 but is not published as identical text.
[p.267] Annexe F
The International Organization for Standardization and International Electrotechnical Commission draw attention to the fact that it is claimed that conformance with this specification may involve the use of inventions covered by patent rights.

ISO and IEC take no position concerning the evidence, validity, and scope of these patent rights.

The following parties have informed ISO and IEC that they may hold patent rights relevant to this part of this International Standard, and have assured ISO and IEC that they are willing to negotiate licenses under reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and conditions with applicants throughout the world for patent rights necessary in order to manufacture, use, and/or sell implementations of this part of this International Standard.

Table F-1 – Organisations providing patent rights licensing notices
[inter alia] ...
Microsoft Corporation
...
Motorola
... [emphasis added]
Unfortunately I don't have an uptodate version of this document. Nor do I still have the notice VLC once published stating their stance on patent claims. It may have been removed as it could have been construed as legal advice, altho' all it said was
[paraphrased] We don't know what patents might or might not be involved. If you want a proper answer go see your lawyer.

According to the Wayback Machine the notice currently appearing at http://www.videolan.org/press/patents.html has been there since 2009-02-01, and my attempts to get the earlier version are blocked by fog. I have been a happy user of x264, but recent events are causing me to take precautions against the eventual dawn busting down of my door. I live only 15 km from where it happened to Mr Dotcom.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

vlc.h
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, November 18 2012 @ 03:05 PM EST
This boilerplate appears on various files in the ffmpeg and vlc families
unfortunately I don't find any corresponding h264 code on my machine.
/* vlc.h, variable length code tables (used by routines in putvlc.c) */

/* Copyright (C) 1996, MPEG Software Simulation Group. All Rights Reserved. */

/*
* Disclaimer of Warranty
*
* These software programs are available to the user without any license fee or
* royalty on an "as is" basis. The MPEG Software Simulation Group disclaims
* any and all warranties, whether express, implied, or statuary, including any
* implied warranties or merchantability or of fitness for a particular
* purpose. In no event shall the copyright-holder be liable for any
* incidental, punitive, or consequential damages of any kind whatsoever
* arising from the use of these programs.
*
* This disclaimer of warranty extends to the user of these programs and user's
* customers, employees, agents, transferees, successors, and assigns.
*
* The MPEG Software Simulation Group does not represent or warrant that the
* programs furnished hereunder are free of infringement of any third-party
* patents.
*
* Commercial implementations of MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 video, including shareware,
* are subject to royalty fees to patent holders. Many of these patents are
* general enough such that they are unavoidable regardless of implementation
* design.
*
*/

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

  • vlc.h - Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, November 19 2012 @ 02:22 AM EST
    • vlc.h - Authored by: yacc on Monday, November 19 2012 @ 09:10 AM EST
Could the judge and the US Government become complicit?
Authored by: yacc on Monday, November 19 2012 @ 09:18 AM EST
Lucky for me, I live in a country that does not extradite
it's own citizens. If your DA wants to prosecute me, he is
free to send over his evidence, and then the local DA will
decide if it warrants local prosecution.

The UK/US extradition agreement would not pass constitutional
muster.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Comments are owned by the individual posters.

PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details )