News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on It’s Opus, it rocks and now it’s an audio codec standard. Parent comment

Re:It’s Opus, it rocks and now it’s an audio codec standard by wissler on Tuesday September 11, 2012 @07:24PM (#4508296)
The mere threat is enough to keep people from investing much in these "alternatives." E.g., Steve Jobs wrote:

"All video codecs are covered by patents," Jobs wrote from his iPad. "A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other 'open source' codecs now. Unfortunately, just because something is open source, it doesn’t mean or guarantee that it doesn’t infringe on others patents. An open standard is different from being royalty free or open source."

You can bet that if Theora ever got traction and seriously interrupted MPLA's revenue stream, there would be suits. Before that time it'd be pointless for them to sue.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:It’s Opus, it rocks and now it’s an audio codec standard by shmerl on Tuesday September 11, 2012 @08:25PM (#4508475)
That's the whole point. They have no proof to show, because really those codecs are not violating any patents. But they want to create fear to ban competition.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:It’s Opus, it rocks and now it’s an audio codec standard by yuhong on Wednesday September 12, 2012 @12:21AM (#4509128)
In fact: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/09/its-opus-it-rocks-and-now-...
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:It’s Opus, it rocks and now it’s an audio codec standard by shmerl on Wednesday September 12, 2012 @12:25AM (#4509139)
The citation above was about video codecs, FUD about which is spread by MPEG-LA, who never showed any patents as a proof.

Opus is another story, since Qualcomm and Huawei listed supposedly violated patents, so Opus creators were able to review them and to confirm that those claims are bogus.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:It’s Opus, it rocks and now it’s an audio codec standard by nullc on Wednesday September 12, 2012 @02:12AM (#4509367)
Right. This is the advantage of the IETF's patent policy, and it's one of the reasons we wanted to do this work in the context of the IETF.
[ Parent | on HN ]