Re: [rtcweb] VP8 litigation in Germany?

Harald Alvestrand <harald@alvestrand.no> Mon, 11 March 2013 18:59 UTC

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Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2013 19:58:58 +0100
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Subject: Re: [rtcweb] VP8 litigation in Germany?
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Thanks for the comment - I've been in contact with our legal people too, 
and they say that German process rules say that we can't comment on the 
ongoing legal case (even beyond our usual "we don't comment on ongoing 
legal processes").

We'll comment once the case is resolved, I guess.

On 03/11/2013 04:06 PM, Markus.Isomaki@nokia.com wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I am not personally aware of any more details of this case than what is included below. However, I have been in contact with the Nokia Legal department about it. It is true that Nokia believes we have IPR related to VP8. Although the disclosure obligations are not entirely clear in this case as seen e.g. in [1], Nokia is preparing to do a disclosure about it to the IETF, "to ensure that IETF working groups and participants have as much information about any IPR constraints on a technical proposal as possible", as stated in RFC 3979. That's all the information I have right now, but I will keep this list updated as soon as something new comes up.
>   
> [1]http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/rtcweb/current/msg06578.html
>
> Markus
>
> *From:*rtcweb-bounces@ietf.org [mailto:rtcweb-bounces@ietf.org] *On 
> Behalf Of *ext Stephan Wenger
> *Sent:* 10 March, 2013 04:32
> *To:* rtcweb@ietf.org
> *Subject:* [rtcweb] VP8 litigation in Germany?
>
> Hi,
>
> An additional data point.
>
> Florian Mueller writes in his patent blog 
> (http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/03/patent-clouds-remain-over-vp8-google.html) 
> that he has attended a court hearing in Mannheim, Germany, where, 
> according to his blog, "Counsel for Nokia indeed based the 
> infringement allegation in no small part on what the specifications of 
> the Google-controlled VP8 standard say, which is an unmistakable sign 
> that Nokia considers EP1206881 to be inevitably infringed by all 
> implementations of VP8."
>
> Now, I understand that Mr. Mueller is not particularly highly regarded 
> by a whole bunch of people in the open source community.  I myself 
> find a number of other statements in this blog post, however carefully 
> worded, somewhat questionable.  OTOH, I consider it very unlikely that 
> he made up all those reported facts.
>
> That my former colleagues in Nokia decide to sue over this patent (if 
> they have done so) does, of course, not mean that the VP8 
> implementation of HTC infringes, let alone all VP8 implementations. 
>  Quite likely we will never know either way---most patent lawsuits are 
> settled out of court.
>
> One other data point: Mr. Mueller is correct in that Nokia is not a 
> member of the H.264 pool.  Nor are they members in any other video 
> coding related patent pool that I'm aware of, despite IMO having one 
> of the strongest video coding research teams in the industry (I was 
> part of that myself, a while ago).
>
> Regards,
>
> Stephan
>
>
>
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