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Off Topic Thread | 310 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Why Now?
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, March 24 2013 @ 10:18 PM EDT
Interesting timing on Nokia's part, don't you think? It's like a bomb went off in the room, or at least inside my head. Why didn't Nokia mention them earlier, one wonders? These are old patents. So they had to know earlier, I would think.
It might have had something to do with Google's agreement with MPEG-LA, of which Nokia is not a member, and thus would not have been a party to any consultation, nor had much inside information on the deal. Also Nokia seems confident in its pursuit of HTC thru the German courts:
Florian Mueller writes in his patent blog (http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/03/patent-clouds-remain-over- vp8-google.html) that he has attended a court hearing in Mannheim, Germany, where, according to his blog, "Counsel for Nokia indeed based the infringement allegation in no small part on what the specifications of the Google-controlled VP8 standard say, which is an unmistakable sign that Nokia considers EP1206881 to be inevitably infringed by all implementations of VP8."

Now, I understand that Mr. Mueller is not particularly highly regarded by a whole bunch of people in the open source community. I myself find a number of other statements in this blog post, however carefully worded, somewhat questionable. OTOH, I consider it very unlikely that he made up all those reported facts.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Corrections Thread
Authored by: artp on Sunday, March 24 2013 @ 10:48 PM EDT
"Erorr" -> "Error" in TItle Block if possible, please.

---
Userfriendly on WGA server outage:
When you're chained to an oar you don't think you should go down when the galley
sinks ?

[ Reply to This | # ]

Off Topic Thread
Authored by: artp on Sunday, March 24 2013 @ 10:50 PM EDT
If there is prior art, stay away from the topic. All
discussions must be completely original, therefore totally
inhuman.

Thank you.

---
Userfriendly on WGA server outage:
When you're chained to an oar you don't think you should go down when the galley
sinks ?

[ Reply to This | # ]

News Picks Thread
Authored by: artp on Sunday, March 24 2013 @ 10:52 PM EDT
URL, please.

Where, oh where did my sidebar scroll? Where, oh where could
it be?

---
Userfriendly on WGA server outage:
When you're chained to an oar you don't think you should go down when the galley
sinks ?

[ Reply to This | # ]

Comes Goes Here
Authored by: artp on Sunday, March 24 2013 @ 10:55 PM EDT
See the link above for "Comes v. MS" for complete details.
More work to be done and so little time to do it.

---
Userfriendly on WGA server outage:
When you're chained to an oar you don't think you should go down when the galley
sinks ?

[ Reply to This | # ]

  • 2848 - Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, March 27 2013 @ 05:46 PM EDT
    • 2848 - Authored by: PJ on Wednesday, March 27 2013 @ 06:34 PM EDT
  • 2851 - Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, March 27 2013 @ 11:30 PM EDT
Every system does exactly what it was designed to do
Authored by: artp on Sunday, March 24 2013 @ 11:24 PM EDT

The difficulty lies in determining exactly what it was that you designed it to do. :-)

As I read the article, a couple of points jump out at me.

First, it appears that there is no need for a continuation on a patent from an engineering standpoint. You either invented something or you didn't. If you didn't, then you don't get a patent. You either understand what you invented or you don't. If you don't, then you can't write the patent application. What is the difficulty here?

Risch states:

Their counter argument is that continuations are necessary because patentees often don't know the full scope of what's a new invention when they file.

I'm sure that there are many legal application of the continuation. Engineers, after all, create many tools to do their work. We should expect no less of other professions. We can expect that they will use appropriate levels of ethics, though, and continuations seem to have bled over that boundary.

Second, PJ addresses the impossibility of ever getting rid of a patent application for good.

The article, for example, describes how applicants work to wear an examiner down: "There is no way an examiner can ever cause a determined applicant to go away, though allowing the applicant’s patent claims will increase the chance that the case will finally be disposed of."

When we were raising our kids, we subscribed to the strategies of John Rosemond. Rosemond was big on figuring out what "natural and logical consequences" would be for undesirable behavior. IOW, how do I make the child care more about their behavior than I do?

I would suggest that one way to let patentees bear the burden of their bad choices would be to put their application at the bottom of the pile if they file a continuation. That creates space at the top for other applicants who have not yet had a shot at approval. It doesn't reject the application completely, it just rewards the continuation applicant with the natural and logical consequences of their strategy. Their decision - their delay.

As it stands now, any consequences for continuations fall on everybody BUT the applicant. The applicant gets to go to the well until the bottom drops out of the bucket, but is still able to haul water in it.

My proposal just allocates some of the delay to the applicant, who has created the situation by their own desires. They can take that into account when they decide whether to apply for a continuation or not. Their choice.

If Rosemond's theories are correct, the applicants will find a way around this, just like children do. So we will have to find a different way of making them care about their misbehavior more than we do. And do not doubt for a second that it is misbehavior. They are using more than their fair share of resources, and are not playing nicely with others. This is antisocial behavior, and must not be tolerated, or civilization will come crumbling down around our ears. And before you know it, someone will be patenting rounded corners, rectangles and software. ;-)

---
Userfriendly on WGA server outage:
When you're chained to an oar you don't think you should go down when the galley sinks ?

[ Reply to This | # ]

Continuations
Authored by: macliam on Monday, March 25 2013 @ 12:33 AM EDT

If you examine the continuations, you should find that the specification is the same for all of them. For example, I was looking at US6735249, US7149251 and US20070140342. And yes, if you look at the specifications, there might be an introductory sentence or so to say that you have a continuation. In these patents section of the the '251 patent entitled CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATION begins:

This Application is a continuation of U.S. Patent Application… now U.S. Pat. No. 6,735,249.

Then, in theory at least, the two patent specifications should continue to match up, word for word—until you reach the list of claims. Then the patent documents will diverge. The diagrams should also match up. Basically, the continuation just piles extra claims that read on the embodiment disclosed in the first patent (in this case the '249 patent).

Basically, to people unfamiliar with patent law, the two inventions are the same invention. But, to patent lawyers and judges, each claim is a separate ‘invention’. You should find independent claims followed by lists of dependent claims that progressively narrow the scope of the claim. But otherwise, the claims are treated as separate inventions. A method or apparatus infringes one of these patents, provided that Nokia can prove that at least one patent claim reads on the allegedly infringing device, i.e., that the device matches the text of the claim as the claim language would be interpreted by a person having ordinary skill in the relevant art. To invalidate the claim, you need to prove that the specific claim reads on a device that was prior art back in 1999.

It is no good just finding an example of ‘prior art’ that resembles the embodiment disclosed in the '249 specification. The degree of resemblence, or lack of resemblence, between the alleged infringing method or apparatus and the prior art method or apparatus and the embodiment disclosed in the '249 specification is totally irrelevant for purposes of determining infringement or proving invalidity. All that matters is whether or not the infringing technology or the prior art technology comes within the scope of the claim, when that claim is given its broadest interpretation consistent with the specification.

Thus continuations are a way of piling on claim after claim to catch more allegedly infringing technologies in the net, or to provide fallbacks if claims previously made are invalidated.

[ Reply to This | # ]

The Nokia Patents and VP8 - Prior Art Hunting Time ~pj
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 25 2013 @ 05:55 AM EDT
I'm so disappointed with Nokia :/
I can't say anything but micro$oft touch of death... and I feel no more
sentiment for nokia dying after their stupid move to windows 8.

The sad thing is that one can be sued for patents that he never knew about. So
in this case how can the patent be non-obvious? What is the rational behind
paying damages?

[ Reply to This | # ]

VP8 licence
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 25 2013 @ 06:47 AM EDT
If Nokia sues anybody who uses the wemb then they do not
have possibility to use webm at all in any devices. There
are some standards that will have webm as must and if Im not
wrong websocket is one of those. So if WP will implement
websocket then Nokia can not sell WP anymore.

Basicly only thing Google needs to do is force webm on
youtube for all mobile devices if its not the case already.
Problem solved.

[ Reply to This | # ]

US 6504873
Authored by: jesse on Monday, March 25 2013 @ 07:30 AM EDT
Appears to be what is commonly known as "dithering".

In this case, specifically to hide the edges of blocks of the image.

Dithering goes way back to WW2, done by motorized vibrators to allow more
precise bombing runs.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither

[ Reply to This | # ]

Clarification please - Nokia vs VP8 (vs MPEG LA & MS)?
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 25 2013 @ 08:35 AM EDT
Before starting in on the "search" could someone please help
clarify two or three points for me:

Nokia (a Microsoft partner) claims that their 'infringed'
patents are necessary for the new 'Standard' and will not
license these under any terms, SEP FRAND etc.. This is to kill
the 'new' standard - not to make money from it - maintaining
H.264 as their favoured "open and collaborative" method?
Does this mean that these same patents have been 'committed'
to Mpeg LA under the SEP rule as FRAND - since Nokia (even
as an MS partner and counter to MS interests?) did not
contribute to the patent pool - as the problems with such
members have already been overcome.

Surely this means that they already successfully license
these as a part of H.264, SEP covered by FRAND (as Motorola)?
If not, then are they claiming that it is only the new VP8
Standard that infringes or would H.264 infringe if they
chose to assert them?

How to view their relationship with other H.264 Patents -
as potential prior art against Nokia or vice versa
underpinning, or building on H.264 - bozo tweaks or what?
Do the Nokia Patents have to be stand on their own? Perhaps
in a sense as 'fundamental' to H.264 or can they be an
'intermediate' stage, themselves relying and building
on (and citing?) donated H.264 patents to give them their
"essential" aspect? Do individual "claims" have to be
seen as part of, within a standard or as "standalone claims"?

As another complication, can the Nokia (non-MPEG LA)/MS
'partnership' alter any of these questions? Maybe not
directly in this case but in how these patents had previously
been asserted against, or licensed to members of MPEG LA
and on what basis - fair and non-discriminatory or
favourable to MS?

[ Reply to This | # ]

Additional information on Australian patents
Authored by: feldegast on Monday, March 25 2013 @ 10:00 AM EDT
After ding a quick search on the 2 Australian patents I have some additional information

30275/01 -> http://pericles.ipaustralia.gov.au/ols/auspat/applicationDet ails.do?applicationNo=2001030275
Application number : 2001030275
Title : A method and associated device for filtering digital video images
Applicant(s) : Nokia Corporation
Inventor(s) : Aksu, Emre; Kalevo, Ossi; Karczewicz, Marta
Filing date : 2001-01-22
Application status : GRANTED

---------------------------------
2007311526 -> http://pericles.ipaustralia.gov.au/ols/auspt/applicationDetai ls.do?applicationNo=2007311526
Application number : 2007311526
Title : System and method for providing picture output indications in video coding
Applicant(s) : Nokia Corporation
Inventor(s) : Wang, Ye-Kui; Hannuksela, Miska
Filing date : 2007-08-29
Application status : GRANTED

---
IANAL
My posts are ©2004-2013 and released under the Creative Commons License Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0
P.J. has permission for commercial use.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Why Estonia matters
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 25 2013 @ 12:18 PM EDT
Nokia is based in Finland. From Helsinki, the capital of
Finland, to Talinn, the capital of Estonia, is a two-hour
ferry ride. As I understand it, Finnish and Estonian (and
Hungarian-Magyar), form a language group unlike anything else
(can anybody elaborate in a reply?), so maybe some linguistic
subtleties can be buried in their patents. I'm also
interested that countries like Turkey and Vietnam are there.
Perhaps it has to do with the nationality of the employee
that produced the "idea".

[ Reply to This | # ]

patent 20010017944
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 25 2013 @ 05:43 PM EDT
I took a look a this and, to me, it reads like poorly written,
poorly formatted gobbledygook with a few mathematical
equations thrown in. From what little I can make out of it,
it looks like another dithering scheme.

[ Reply to This | # ]

The Nokia Patents and VP8 - Prior Art Hunting Time ~pj
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 25 2013 @ 08:42 PM EDT
Shouldn't we insist that an inventor wait until the innovation process is
complete before filling.

Take the example of two inventors both working on a similar device.
Traditionally who ever is smarter finishes first and gets the patent. What
companies are doing now is patenting before they finish the work to cut off
others that may be working on similar devices.

[ Reply to This | # ]

The Nokia Patents and VP8 - Prior Art Hunting Time ~pj
Authored by: macliam on Tuesday, March 26 2013 @ 05:47 AM EDT

Say you have a video of a ball rotating and flying through the air. You have a reference frame, and you want to encode a current frame (say) one second later. To construct the later frame, you divide up into 16x16 pixel 'segments'. For each segment, you find a portion of the previous image that bests matches the current image for that segment, and specify the coefficients a, b, c, d, e, f for a motion sending (x,y) to (a + cx + ey, b + dx + fy) that maps the current segment to the portion of the reference frame that most resembles it (which will probably be an image of the moving rotating ball at the earlier time whereever it was in the frame). Then you transmit the six motion coefficients (probably with other information that allows for improving the image). So far, this seems to be in the prior art. What makes this invention novel is that, instead of using the motion coefficients determined by the current frame, it may make sense to use those of the frame immediately to the left, or immediately above, suitably transformed. If you can do so, then you need to transmit less information. Therefore you determine which of the various methods (using coefficients calculating coefficients for the current frame, or reusing them from a frame to the left or above, assuming left to right, top to bottom encoding) gives the better compression, and then transmit data accordingly. So the following questions. Does the proposed standard do things this way? Is there any prior art teaching using using the affine motion model with transformed coeefficients from neighboring frames? Is there something else in one of Nokia's other claims teaching something different that might be infringed?

[ Reply to This | # ]

The Nokia Patents and VP8 - Prior Art Hunting Time ~pj
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 26 2013 @ 11:47 AM EDT

htt p://pdf.aminer.org/000/389/918/constra ints_for_the_estimatio n_of_displacement_vector_fields_from_image.pdf

< p>The article is, as far as I can tell, from 1983. It talks abouth oriented smoothness of vector field and minimization function.

ABSTRACT
Smoothness constraints have been used to facilitate the estimation of displacement vector fields. Differing from HORN and SCHUNCK 81 who employ a general smoothness requirement, this contribution reports an analysis of an "oriented smoothness" requirement: a change in the displacement vector field is only constrained in the direction perpendicular to the characteristic gray value variation based on which the displacement vector is estimated. An iterative solution for the resulting system of nonlinear partial differential equations is developed. It is shown how this system of equations relates to the one derived by HORN and SCHUNCK 81.

/Peter

[ Reply to This | # ]

Trying to understand the patents
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 26 2013 @ 04:17 PM EDT
In order to find prior art I guess it would help to understand the claims of the
patents.

[ Reply to This | # ]

1999 Survey: (with extensive refs) Image and Video Compression:
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 26 2013 @ 07:35 PM EDT
1999 'state of the art' academic survey of compression techniques:

application_of_the_minimum_description
_length_prin ciple_to_object_ori ented.pdf

This paper from Roger J. Clarke
Department of Computing and Electrical Engineering,
Heriot-Watt University,Edinburgh
might help some of us to understand the state of the art about the
time that Nokia were filing the first patents. In particular,
there is an extensive list of references which might provide
links or leads to prior art - if you can gain access?

[ Reply to This | # ]

Listing Independent Claims per Patent
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 26 2013 @ 07:37 PM EDT
Ideally we want prior art for every single claim in every single patent. That
is huge, however. The fear then is that we concentrate in some areas and not
others. As a first measure we should make sure that there is some prior art
against each "independent" claim. I've put together a list for each
patent and will post them separately so that it's easy to record where there is
something missing.

[ Reply to This | # ]

patent US 6735249 - I call "FUD"
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, March 27 2013 @ 01:20 AM EDT
There is a basic problem with claiming that the VP8 spec
infringes '249. '249 is an encoding-efficiency patent. VP8
is a decoding specification.

VP8 follows a very common practice in video codec standards
specifications: it defines a "reference decoder" and a
bitstream format. The specification tells you precisely what
images a compliant decoder will render when it receives any
specific valid bitstream. There are many different
bitstreams that result in the same (or nearly the same)
video playback. You, as a person building or writing an
encoder, may exhibit great cleverness in finding the
smallest bitstream which plays the video you're sending with
acceptable quality. Bully for you! The standard does not
*require* you to be clever about encoding, nor to be clever
in any particular way.

Thus encoding-efficiency techniques (like '249) are hardly
ever "standards-essential" for codecs, because the standard
doesn't require you to encode efficiently.

All three of '249's independent claims (1, 25, and 41)
specifically claim a method for choosing between two
alternative motion vector encodings. Even if the choice they
describe is possible in VP8 (I'm not convinced it is), there
is no need to make the choice in the manner they describe in
order to write an encoder.

In a different context, it might be considered responsible
citizenship for Nokia to let encoder-designers know that
some of the clever ideas they might come up with for
efficient encoding have been patented. However here, where
the implication seems to be "these patents are essential and
we won't license them", it is BS in the finest FUD
tradition.

IMHO we can cross '249 off the list of patents blocking VP8
adoption.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Equitable Estoppel..
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, March 27 2013 @ 06:20 AM EDT
.

Isn't this call Equitable Estoppel?

Because these are old patents (mostly), which Nokia knew about and just when the IETF was to reach a consensus then up jump Nokia deciding to release these patents in a discriminated way to block VP8 adoption.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Pub. and Grant Number: 1186177
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, March 27 2013 @ 10:30 AM EDT
Hi,

Patents from several countries with the publication and Grant number above seem to be translations of a European patent to several languages/national patent systems.

Link to the Swedish patent summary page

Link to the Swedish patent document (pdf)

Link to the European patent summary page

Link to the European patent document (pdf)

Stéphane

[ Reply to This | # ]

Update: Here's a chart showing how long a random set of patents.........
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 01:54 AM EDT

Update: Here's a chart showing how long a random set of patents that issued in 2012.....

Was there suppose to be a link showing a chart?

[ Reply to This | # ]

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