After JPEG, now MP3 in Patent Mess
Posted by Sachin Garg on 7th May 2007 | Permanent Link
After forgent’s JPEG patent claims, its Alcatel-Lucent’s claims on MP3. A US judge has approved a jury’s decision to award Alcatel-Lucent $1.52 billion after it ruled that Microsoft had infringed an audio technology patent.
MP3 was never patent free, with its inventor, Germany’s Fraunhofer institute known as ‘the industry-recognised rightful licensor’. But patents are not ‘bad’ in general (unless you are a dreamy eyed purist), just that these submarine type patents are a reason for concern.
Forgent waited almost the entire patent period before they started asserting their JPEG patent (which was in the end deemed invalid by USPTO).
Another case is that filed by Qualcomm against Irvine chip-making rival Broadcom. Qualcomm had at least four engineers participate in an international effort to develop the H.264 video-compression standard yet failed to disclose at the time that it owned patents that might apply to the standard. The upcoming hearing is to determine whether Qualcomm should be barred from claiming royalties on the two patents or whether the company should be allowed to participate in a pool of patent owners that share royalties on H.264-related patents.
And another case alleges Gateway, Dell and Microsoft have breached patents connected with video encoding. The case sites three patents, Patent 5,136,377 is called “Adaptive non-linear quantizer” and issued on the 4th of August 1992. The 5,500,678 patent called “Optimized scanning of transform coefficients in video coding” was granted on the 18th of March 1996. The 5,563,593 patent - “Video coding with optimized low complexity variable length codes” - was issued on 8th of October 1996 with a certificate of correction issued on 28th of March 2006.
Now if these are the trends with technologies developed when playing field was much less crowded, one can very well imagine how it will be for codecs that are being developed today.