[HN Gopher] Nokia sues Amazon, HP over video compression technology
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Nokia sues Amazon, HP over video compression technology
Author : helsinkiandrew
Score : 68 points
Date : 2023-11-02 15:06 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.streamtvinsider.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.streamtvinsider.com)
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Nokia's blog post about litigation:
|
| https://www.nokia.com/blog/nokia-seeks-compensation-for-amaz...
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| > While Nokia's complaint against Amazon concerned streaming
| video, its complaint against HP involved the company's desktop
| and laptop computers, which allegedly contained the same
| proprietary H.264 and H.265 technology.
|
| I have not read Nokia's brief, but that is particularly eyebrow
| raising.
|
| Is Microsoft shipping h264 as a OEM MS Store app like they do for
| HEVC these days? Either that, or they must be shipping bloatware
| with AVC, otherwise it seems the buck would stop with
| Intel/AMD/Nvidia/Microsoft, not HP.
|
| All this is just another nail in the coffin for VVC though. No
| one big enough to get sued wants to touch it with a 10 foot pole,
| and Nokia has justified the paranoia once again.
| fweimer wrote:
| I thought that with patents, each entity among the
| manufacturing chain potentially needs a license? There is no
| analog for the first sale doctrine, or neither a requirement
| for consistent enforcement (as is there for trademarks).
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| As far as hardware decoding goes, I thought chipmakers paid
| the fee for everyone down the line?
|
| Otherwise... thats pretty horrific. Would businesses using HP
| laptops en masse be exposed too?
| fweimer wrote:
| Certainly not for everyone. Even if you buy professional
| videoconferencing equipment for business purposes, you do
| not get a patent license for its commercial use. Those paid
| offerings typically come with terms similar to the ones
| Cisco includes in their free Open264 builds:
|
| THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO
| LICENSE FOR THE PERSONAL USE OF A CONSUMER OR OTHER USES IN
| WHICH IT DOES NOT RECEIVE REMUNERATION TO (i) ENCODE VIDEO
| IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC STANDARD ("AVC VIDEO") AND/OR
| (ii) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED BY A CONSUMER
| ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL ACTIVITY AND/OR WAS OBTAINED FROM A
| VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO.
|
| https://www.openh264.org/BINARY_LICENSE.txt
|
| I'm not sure if if the relevant patent pools even have
| incoming licensing coverage for live Internet video because
| that arrived only after the pools had long been
| established.
| derf_ wrote:
| _> There is no analog for the first sale doctrine..._
|
| There is. It is called patent exhaustion. See https://en.wiki
| pedia.org/wiki/Exhaustion_doctrine_under_U.S....
|
| There was a fad of issuing a "covenant not to sue" in lieu of
| a license, specifically to try to avoid triggering
| exhaustion, but courts seem to be (correctly, in my IANAL
| opinion) treating them as licenses anyway. See, e.g.,
| https://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2013/01/3rd-circuit-
| covenan...
| fweimer wrote:
| But isn't that easily avoided by suitably scoping the
| license grant?
| derf_ wrote:
| I would not say "easily"... patent holders will
| absolutely try to avoid the effects of exhaustion by
| imposing post-sale or field-of-use restrictions, but
| lawsuits about it have gone to the Supreme Court, e.g.,
| https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/553/617/ (and
| not worked out well for the patent holder).
| GJR wrote:
| Nokia must be desperate for cash. Developing video codecs is a
| painful exercise as some part of the implementation almost always
| relies on prior art. The company that I worked for were sued for
| our implementation of an MPEG-2 codec, because of a similar
| patent owned by a troll. These cases are what hold innovation
| back and are only attractive to the trolls because of how many
| h.264/h.265 codec instances are running out there. The usual
| technique is to go for the little guys first and then move up the
| food chain.
| sublimefire wrote:
| Given the patents were issued in '00s and they expire after 20
| years it looks like the last chance to monetize them.
| tpmx wrote:
| > The usual technique is to go for the little guys first and
| then move up the food chain.
|
| Stating the obvious: That's hardly the case here.
| acdha wrote:
| I drew the opposite conclusion:
|
| > The patents were at the center of a legal dispute involving
| Lenovo in 2020, in which the computer maker claimed Nokia did
| not fully disclose its intellectual property interest to the
| ITU and ISO while the bodies were working to standardize
| H.264. That lawsuit was settled one year later, with Lenovo
| and Nokia agreeing on a cross-licensing agreement.
|
| That looks like patent trolling to me: sue someone who's not
| really in the business and settle so when you sue a bigger
| player you can tell the judge that this other company did the
| right thing and paid for your incredibly critical technology.
| tpmx wrote:
| I feel that's insulting towards judges in Delaware. Are you
| saying they are that dumb? (that's where the lawsuits were
| filed according to the article)
| GJR wrote:
| The earlier victories won't have been reported.
| tpmx wrote:
| Nokia going patent troll on small companies would not have
| gotten press? That is not very believable.
| papichulo2023 wrote:
| Please MS, do all of us a favour and erase it. The 5g hardware
| was their last chance to stay relevant.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Does anyone know the "why now" for this litigation? I had a look
| at Nokia's own blog post about this, but it's unclear why they
| sat on this for years.
| burnte wrote:
| Presumably negotiations were going no where and they felt HP
| would never really settle it.
| thedaly wrote:
| It was mentioned elsewhere in this thread that the patents were
| issued in the early 00s and were valid for 20 years, so they
| will be expiring soon.
| callalex wrote:
| Patents last for 20 years and these were granted in the mid
| 00's. They're milking the last drops out of their cow.
| photoGrant wrote:
| "Did you know, for example, that content optimization on your
| device's screen when switching between portrait and landscape
| video is a Nokia invention? And fast forwarding or rewinding a
| video by scrolling through it, while simultaneously displaying
| the current scene"
| esaym wrote:
| That is actually a direct quote lol
| callalex wrote:
| Sheesh, I should patent urinating after drinking a beverage,
| that's about as novel of an invention.
| coreyp_1 wrote:
| As for fast forward and rewind while seeing the current scene,
| we did this back in the days of the VCR. Are they claiming to
| have invented that?
| themoonisachees wrote:
| A VCR would simply display the frames that happened to pass
| by the read heads while rewinding.
|
| When doing that digitally, your codec decides if that is even
| feasible. If the codec optimizes for disk space, generating
| any frame requires going through all previous frames. If the
| codec optimizes for fast scrubbing, the file must contain
| redundant information and thus be larger.
|
| Nokia is claiming that h264's checkpointing mechanisms allow
| for that (empirically, this is indeed a feature of h264) and
| it is therefore their invention. I'm unaware if previous
| codecs had similar mechanisms. It would be wierd of none had,
| but it wouldn't surprise me that much.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| MPEG2 has I, P, and B, frames, so unless they "refreshed"
| the patent is somehow old, someone at Nokia just came up
| with the scrubbing idea using the existing implementation.
|
| ...But video players have had scrubbing bars for a long
| time? I'm not sure how long, my memory on Windows on XP and
| older is fuzzy.
| IshKebab wrote:
| > generating any frame requires going through all previous
| frames
|
| No it doesn't; that would be crazy. There are keyframes
| that can be decoded independently of any other frame.
| They're usually every few seconds at most, which is fine
| for scrubbing.
| tpmx wrote:
| So afaik Nokia did not patent _and_ enforce that.
|
| Meanwhile e.g. Apple has very strongly enforced similarly silly
| UX patents. (E.g. rubberband/inertial scrolling and quite a few
| more.)
|
| They have also very strongly enforced silly design patents -
| e.g. for rounded corners on physical devices.
| zoobab wrote:
| Nokia is also a judge at the Unified Patent Court:
|
| https://ffii.org/nokia-and-airbus-elected-as-judges-at-the-k...
|
| This Court is a Kangaroo one.
| tpmx wrote:
| That East Texas court comes to mind...
| tombert wrote:
| It's not perfect, but h264 is generally "pretty good", and
| presumably its patents should be expiring in the next few years.
| At that point, we will (hopefully) finally have a codec that's
| supported basically everywhere, has pretty decent "quality to
| size" ratio, and will cost nothing to license.
|
| Of course, by that point I'm sure everyone will have moved onto
| HEVC or something, but a guy can dream of this utopia.
| justinrstout wrote:
| FWIW we currently have this in the AV1 codec which is royalty-
| free and has a better quality/size ratio than h264.
| tombert wrote:
| AV1 looks very cool but it doesn't have nearly the level of
| compatibility that H264 has. H264 works out of the box on
| browsers, as well as having hardware support on phones and
| SBCs and set-top-boxes and whatnot.
|
| AV1 might eventually get there, and that would be awesome if
| it does, but H264 has been around long enough to have a
| substantial "first mover advantage" over AV1.
| buttersbrian wrote:
| Fair, but that's a matter of time it seems. I think AV1 is
| a good bet.
| tombert wrote:
| Yeah, no question; H264 had a 10+ year head start and
| entrenched itself as part of the Blu-ray and online video
| sharing space. Once AV1 has similarly-largely-scoped
| things then it'll probably take a lot of h264's market,
| and it'll be royalty-free from the get-go.
|
| I definitely want AV1 to become the "video standard to
| rule them all", but once H264's patents expire I think
| I'm also ok with it being the standard as well.
| papichulo2023 wrote:
| Last Raspberry doesnt have H264 decode hardware, wouldnt be
| surprised if that becomes a trend. A lot of SBCs only
| support up to 1080 on h264, 4k requires h265.
| tombert wrote:
| Yeah, I read that, though I think the latest Raspberry Pi
| might be fast enough to decode h264 in software so it
| might be a non-issue anyway; as long as it is fast enough
| I think I actually prefer software decoding just because
| (I think) it's more platform-independent.
|
| I think I get your point though; if the Raspberry Pi is
| not adding chips for native H264 decoding, set top boxes
| and other SBCs might drop it as well.
| miohtama wrote:
| On the patents of AV1 earlier this week in Hacker News
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38083588#38088009
|
| TL;DR It's neither patent free nor "patent safe".
| tillinghast wrote:
| Corporate death rattle.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Hopefully standardization committees in future will have learned
| to commit to open source, open licensing, mutual patent
| retaliation, or at least _some_ method to prevent one defector
| from actually suing all the rest.
| advael wrote:
| Software patents are dumb, no exceptions
|
| Then again, I think IP is a bad paradigm that does more harm than
| good in general
| ratsmack wrote:
| The hallmarks of a dying company... attempting to sue everyone
| until you become profitable. It worked out pretty well for SCO.
| oliwarner wrote:
| I think if you sit on your thumbs for 20 years while MPEG LA sell
| "your IP" without your permission, and in such a globally obvious
| way, you forfeit all right to that IP. Especially at the eleventh
| hour, like this. Especially when companies like Nokia are so used
| to the patent process. They have no excuse here.
|
| Lenovo were idiots to settle. They fed the troll and now it's
| back.
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(page generated 2023-11-02 23:01 UTC)