In/outputs - a taste plate of stuff that’s passed through my feeds this week

  • {Video codecs} Accusations flying in the aftermath of Steve Jobs’ email While other commentators responding to Steve Job’s threats against open source video formats are sceptical it will come to anything, Florian Mueller isn’t so sure. “… certain patent holders may have refrained from legal action in the past but we may now have reached (or be nearing) a point where at least some of the relevant patent holders may indeed be prepared to strike,” he warns. He points at the litigious area of patents over mobile phone technologies as a trend that may leach into other areas where strict enforcement of soft/hardware patents has been more lax. As he says, “All right holders will prefer to achieve their objectives without suing, which is always just a last resort, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a safe assumption that they aren’t prepared to sue.”
    On the potential of an anti-trust claim being made against the proprietary formats, Mueller notes that, “the only obligation that regulatory authorities could impose on MPEG LA under competition rules would be to make its IP available on a RAND (reasonable and non-discriminatory) basis,” not the dissolution of the entire monopoly.
    ↷ Florian Mueller on FOSS Patents, 10 May 2010.

 

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