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Why Now? | 310 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Why Now?
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 25 2013 @ 03:06 PM EDT
Maybe not directly. But would it not be hard for Nokia to
sue every user? But with Google prepared to pay for all they
could sue one party.
Probably more important, Microsoft would not have liked the
patent free impression after the deal. (Couldn't they stop
MPA?) Specially with all the patent problems of H.264. And
some revenge...
And Nokia has to do something for all that money. Not that
they sell such volumes that Microsoft get's a lot of license
fees back.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Why Now?
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 25 2013 @ 03:24 PM EDT
> what has Nokia got to do with Mpeg-La?

Nothing, and therefore everything. Nokia is not a member of MPEG-LA,
thus could not be a party to any negotiations amongst members of that
organization.

PJ said above:
>>Google said at an IETF conference the other day that sublicenses
will be royalty-free, thanks to the agreement it just signed with MPEG LA,
when up stands a Nokia representative to say MPEG LA isn't the whole
story and Nokia isn't a member.<<

Google previously made a claim to indemnify people who used VP-8
against infringement suits based on the ON2 patents that Google
knew they owned. Google may have monster search engines, but
as posters here repeatedly complain, finding out all possible claims
of all possible patents, plus all the prior art, is nearly impossible.

As part of the VP8/WebM liberation project Google pushed thru
RFC6386 to make it an open standard. Nokia may or may not have
known or cared about this. Nokia may have been prepared to
overlook any possible overlap of its patents for an open web.
But then Google announced a cross-licensing deal with MPEG-LA,
a commercial licensing entity effectively in competition with Nokia.
Now Nokia feels obliged to move.

It's a bit like a combination poker+chess* game, where each player
can time their moves to cause maximum disruption to their
opponent's game. I expect due diligence will reveal the history
of Nokia's patents, and whether any of them may have recently
been owned by other players who are supporting Nokia's elbow.

* Be thankful the stakes here are somewhat less than in the
first game of chess.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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