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Old 30th March 2019, 13:40   #1  |  Link
hajj_3
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Sisvel patent pools formed for VP9 and AV1

bad news, it looks like vp9 and av1 may violate some patents, as a result patent pools have been launched for vp9 and av1:

A list of the patents in the patent pools are not available yet.

There are no costs for content distributors thankfully.

http://sisvel.com/licensing-programs...m/introduction
http://sisvel.com/news-events/news/s...nsing-platform
https://www.streamingmedia.com/Artic...V1-130840.aspx
https://www.streamingmedia.com/Artic...ls-130849.aspx

Last edited by hajj_3; 30th March 2019 at 14:00.
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Old 30th March 2019, 13:49   #2  |  Link
nevcairiel
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This is just a patent troll company. They are not giving out any tangible information whatsoever, like the patents they claim are relevant, or even a number of patents. Don't give them any attention.
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Old 30th March 2019, 13:56   #3  |  Link
hajj_3
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Originally Posted by nevcairiel View Post
This is just a patent troll company. They are not giving out any tangible information whatsoever, like the patents they claim are relevant, or even a number of patents. Don't give them any attention.
It doesn't look like that, JVCKENWOOD, Phillips, Toshiba and others are in this patent pool. They said in one of the links that they will publish a list of their patents.
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Old 31st March 2019, 03:39   #4  |  Link
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This was expected that somebody will try to assert their patents against AV1, if not for other reason just to try to cover AV1 in uncertainty. I'm sure these patents aren't new so I'm sure AOM is already aware of them an has some sort of an answer. Let's see what will happen next..
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Old 1st April 2019, 23:14   #5  |  Link
utack
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Sisvel CEO confirmed that at the moment they have no clue which patents they manage are applicable (at 15:56):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqR63-Xwv6o

Last edited by utack; 1st April 2019 at 23:22.
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Old 2nd April 2019, 15:10   #6  |  Link
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Reminds me of the story about when IBM told Sun they infringed some patents and Sun engineers pointed out they didn't infringe:

OK, maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?"
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Old 2nd April 2019, 16:39   #7  |  Link
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Yet another patent pool that doesn't offer any information to allow evaluation of their IP claims or their license. Timed to coincide with NAB I presume. This is profoundly unhelpful.
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Old 4th April 2019, 18:05   #8  |  Link
birdie
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So, has HEVC adoption stalled and they are resorting to the lowest tactics in order to sow FUD in regard to AV1 and open a litigation against Google? Almost expected.
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Old 4th April 2019, 23:09   #9  |  Link
benwaggoner
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So, has HEVC adoption stalled and they are resorting to the lowest tactics in order to sow FUD in regard to AV1 and open a litigation against Google? Almost expected.
I'm not aware of any indication that Sisvel is part of any "they" involved with HEVC. Is there some?
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Old 5th April 2019, 06:49   #10  |  Link
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Hi Ben, hi all,
scope of this post is try and clarify some of the issues that are being debated in this thread.
My name is Giovanni Ballocca and I’m currently with Sisvel Technology (just to be clear on my position).
I can understand your doubts springing from the current lack of a patent list, but there’s a reason behind that I’m willing to explain.
We’ve been working for some months now to the creation of this licensing program having in mind that the technologies covered, even though not international standards, have been designed in the perspective of a global outreach.
We have, therefore, decided to use the same level of care that we normally apply when dealing with any other standard covered technology (Sisvel has been running licensing program on technologies standardized by the DVB and other SDOs for a long time).
This typically requires a facilitation phase to aggregate a critical mass of IP that ensures the program is not technically irrelevant; appropriate royalty determination; public patent call to open the process to all the interested actors; third party evaluation of the patents (it cannot be us to decide whether or not a patent is necessary to practice a given specification).
As you might have probably heard from the news, we just opened the patent call (other patent owners have shown a definite interest in joining the program) and are in the third party evaluation phase. Only the patent evaluated necessary to perform the specs will be published in the list and this will happen by the end of Q2 2019.
No licensing discussions will be started before the list of patents is made available.
Regarding the specific date for the launch of the program, there is no specific intention to target the NAB or any other event: if you consider the calendar of tradeshows in the CE and ICT space with global relevance it’s almost impossible to announce anything without the risk to collide with some external event. By the way, being involved in other broadcast related business, we’ll be present at the NAB and available chats and clarifications if needed.
I’ll be happy to provide further clarifications where possible.
G.
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Last edited by z_thunder; 5th April 2019 at 07:52.
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Old 6th April 2019, 11:43   #11  |  Link
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Seems slightly odd to have already published the price they intend to charge but they're not actually figured if they have something to offer in exchange. You'd think the price would in some way depend on the quality and quantity of IP being licensed, cost to work around etc
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Old 6th April 2019, 12:27   #12  |  Link
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Seems slightly odd to have already published the price they intend to charge but they're not actually figured if they have something to offer in exchange. You'd think the price would in some way depend on the quality and quantity of IP being licensed, cost to work around etc
Ah I see you are new. Patent trolls use completely arbitrary fantasy numbers to justify prices, they use these inflated prices to attract costumers i.e. more members in the patent pool. Essentially they are running a scam. IF they are smart scammers they ask for prices that they know people can pay. They get no money otherwise, pricing is usually based like this. If they have in any way a legimate case, they will settle out of court for a percentage of profits. If the case ends up in court and it is not a paid shill of the copyright troll they will ask for examples of similar cases and base judgement on that.

Last edited by Gser; 6th April 2019 at 12:34.
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Old 6th April 2019, 14:14   #13  |  Link
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This seems like a common thing with in the more "religious" following of open source and related things that something happens, but you guys misuse the "patent troll" term a lot.

Patent trolling is something completely different. Patent troll has a few patents, lies in wait till the technology is broadly deployed in for-revenue shipping devices, then attacks a specific rich company and demands large sums for those specific patents at court. The payouts are large if successful.

This is plain IP pool - patent trolls don't offer mild/fair per-product fees to everyone, they only extort you at court when they target you. Note also how this is formed and made clear early in AV1 life, before any phone, standalone media player or processor/GPU could ship with AV1 support - patent troll would wait for a moment when a lot of devices would be out in the wild and make base for large damage claims. If they were patent troll, they would just foil themselves, because patent troll only reveals its hand after patent X ships in a lot of devices and products and company Y makes a lot of money on it, so that troll can ask court to grant it a share of that revenue. Just apply logic ffs.

What is so hard in seeing that some companies that didn't want to contribute to AV1/AOM/Google for free but still do video research have patented their results and see them being used/adapted in AV1, and thus they try to get a compensation?

Inb4 you believe that the MPEG-LA settlement with Google over VP8/VP9 was completely bogus and just an extortion that Google decided to pay away despite it being totally dishonest and nono of the patents were valid. People, chill and try to look at these things without the "free things are supreme, infallible and perfect, and everybody else never invents anything and only trolls and runs conspiracies against the true religion blah blah etc" bias.

Sorry for ranting and touching people's bubbles, but sometimes you have to go against popular opinions when they are incorrect and unfair. I like open source and open source media software a lot myself but we need to be honest.

Last edited by mandarinka; 6th April 2019 at 15:11. Reason: typo
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Old 6th April 2019, 22:50   #14  |  Link
iwod
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Originally Posted by mandarinka View Post
This seems like a common thing with in the more "religious" following of open source and related things that something happens, but you guys misuse the "patent troll" term a lot.

Patent trolling is something completely different. Patent troll has a few patents, lies in wait till the technology is broadly deployed in for-revenue shipping devices, then attacks a specific rich company and demands large sums for those specific patents at court. The payouts are large if successful.

This is plain IP pool - patent trolls don't offer mild/fair per-product fees to everyone, they only extort you at court when they target you. Note also how this is formed and made clear early in AV1 life, before any phone, standalone media player or processor/GPU could ship with AV1 support - patent troll would wait for a moment when a lot of devices would be out in the wild and make base for large damage claims. If they were patent troll, they would just foil themselves, because patent troll only reveals its hand after patent X ships in a lot of devices and products and company Y makes a lot of money on it, so that troll can ask court to grant it a share of that revenue. Just apply logic ffs.

What is so hard in seeing that some companies that didn't want to contribute to AV1/AOM/Google for free but still do video research have patented their results and see them being used/adapted in AV1, and thus they try to get a compensation?

Inb4 you believe that the MPEG-LA settlement with Google over VP8/VP9 was completely bogus and just an extortion that Google decided to pay away despite it being totally dishonest and nono of the patents were valid. People, chill and try to look at these things without the "free things are supreme, infallible and perfect, and everybody else never invents anything and only trolls and runs conspiracies against the true religion blah blah etc" bias.

Sorry for ranting and touching people's bubbles, but sometimes you have to go against popular opinions when they are incorrect and unfair. I like open source and open source media software a lot myself but we need to be honest.
I think you did it much better than what I could do and I don't consider any of the above "ranting". Merely pointing out a few facts and truth.

I am also glad to see more people are finally speaking out. ( May be out of intense frustration )

Last edited by iwod; 6th April 2019 at 22:54.
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Old 6th April 2019, 23:16   #15  |  Link
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Google and the rest of AOM don't want to use their IP. If it was easy to know what they claimed ownership of, they would have avoided it. They've already spent literally millions on trying to avoid using unlicensed IP by accident

Changing AV1 now has a definite monetary cost. If it didn't, there would be no point announcing the patents because Google would just remove them. So they are by your own idiosyncratic definition, patent trolls. Google et all are now faced with trading off the cost of fighting or settling this against the cost to redo the standard to work around the patents.

Video codec patents are broken. People at the top of MPEG seems to have accepted this, so it's hardly just the crazy hippies holding this view. It's people actual job to write vague patents, the vaguer the patent the better they are doing their job and the more likely their company will make money. This is not something to celebrate.
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Old 7th April 2019, 15:59   #16  |  Link
mandarinka
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Seriously, do you want everybody in the world to check what Google is doing, do IPR analysis on everything for them at your own expense and then warn them for free?
Before such tools are finalised, so you might end up analysing an experiment that will just get dropped for unrelated reasons? (It also doesn't help both VP9 and AV1 were relatively rushed through development.) If that is anybody's due dilligence, definitely not not of an outsider IP owner. Again, try to look at it without pro-free bias.
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Old 7th April 2019, 16:44   #17  |  Link
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No, I want a functional IP system where you won't accidentally use someone's IP if you don't intend to and the people given 20 years of legal monopoly have to provide some clarity about what they want protected in exchange for that benefit.

Mozilla, Xiph etc. are quite happy to avoid IP that's not available under terms they can accept. Apparently it's impossible for them to do so with any certainty under the current system since there's so many vague patents.

If a patent isn't clear enough for Google's army of lawyers to find and avoid it then it's not clear enough to be worth legal protection.
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Old 7th April 2019, 20:11   #18  |  Link
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I'm not sure it's as clear-cut. For example, the alt-ref thing in VP9/AV1 is really a copy of b-frame mechanism that is designed in a roundabout way to not look totally like b-frames, at a glance. Is that an example of "quite happy to avoid IP that's not available under terms they can accept" in a good sense? Sounds more like use the idea but dodge the responsibility to me, but well, maybe they changed enough details to get away with it.
As for the unclearness - it's perfectly possible the patents just weren't discovered or they weren't careful enough in trying to stay clear. I don't think it's a responsibility of patent holder to reach out to everybody in the world to informa them about it, that's pretty much not viable after all.
Also you call a video compression patent a monopoly and paint is as some injustice. But look at it from the inventor's point of view. They invested money and work. They are probably willing to offer it to multiple parties and not having a monopoly. But Google/AOM will only accept it for free. How can you think that refusing to grant the technology to them in such a situation is unjust? AOM's insistence of being royalty free is their choice, they have no right to push that onto IP holders that aren't okay with that. It's normal to want to be compensated for your property/work.

I think we are starting to hijack this thread though, so better stop this debate (which has been here over and over in the past).

Last edited by mandarinka; 7th April 2019 at 20:22.
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Old 7th April 2019, 22:56   #19  |  Link
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Originally Posted by mandarinka View Post
This seems like a common thing with in the more "religious" following of open source and related things that something happens, but you guys misuse the "patent troll" term a lot.
In this case, I respectfully disagree. Basing your standard business practice around abusing patent hold-up is the very definition of a patent troll. There are ways to make it more egregious; a few are found here though certainly not all. Regardless, Sisvel is trolling. They don't have to, they didn't have to, but they are.
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Old 8th April 2019, 01:22   #20  |  Link
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"They didn't have to." (Or let me paraphrase it, you seem to be suggesting they "shouldn't be doing this".)

If you say that to somebody who might have a legitimate claim to the IP and your reason in the end is that you are the one that has to pay, don't you think that is rather hypocritical and self-centered?
You aren't even impartial here as AOM member/AV1 creator but I don't think you would be in position to tell them that even if you were. So really, trying to paint this position with moral colors, I strongly think that is dishonest and biased, even if you probably don't see that.
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