Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, March 24 2013 @ 10:18 PM EDT

Interesting timing on Nokia's part, don't you think? It's like a bomb went off in the room, or at least inside my head. Why didn't Nokia mention them earlier, one wonders? These are old patents. So they had to know earlier, I would think. It might have had something to do with Google's agreement with MPEG-LA, of which Nokia is not a member, and thus would not have been a party to any consultation, nor had much inside information on the deal. Also Nokia seems confident in its pursuit of HTC thru the German courts: 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. [ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: artp on Sunday, March 24 2013 @ 10:48 PM EDT

"Erorr" -> "Error" in TItle Block if possible, please.



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When you're chained to an oar you don't think you should go down when the galley

sinks ? [ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: artp on Sunday, March 24 2013 @ 10:50 PM EDT

If there is prior art, stay away from the topic. All

discussions must be completely original, therefore totally

inhuman.



Thank you.



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sinks ? [ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: artp on Sunday, March 24 2013 @ 10:52 PM EDT

URL, please.



Where, oh where did my sidebar scroll? Where, oh where could

it be?



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sinks ? [ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: artp on Sunday, March 24 2013 @ 10:55 PM EDT

See the link above for "Comes v. MS" for complete details.

More work to be done and so little time to do it.



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sinks ? [ Reply to This | # ]



2848 - Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, March 27 2013 @ 05:46 PM EDT 2848 - Authored by: PJ on Wednesday, March 27 2013 @ 06:34 PM EDT

- Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, March 27 2013 @ 05:46 PM EDT 2851 - Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, March 27 2013 @ 11:30 PM EDT

Authored by: artp on Sunday, March 24 2013 @ 11:24 PM EDT

The difficulty lies in determining exactly what it was that you designed it to do. :-) As I read the article, a couple of points jump out at me. First, it appears that there is no need for a continuation on a patent from an engineering standpoint. You either invented something or you didn't. If you didn't, then you don't get a patent. You either understand what you invented or you don't. If you don't, then you can't write the patent application. What is the difficulty here? Risch states: Their counter argument is that continuations are necessary because patentees often don't know the full scope of what's a new invention when they file. I'm sure that there are many legal application of the continuation. Engineers, after all, create many tools to do their work. We should expect no less of other professions. We can expect that they will use appropriate levels of ethics, though, and continuations seem to have bled over that boundary. Second, PJ addresses the impossibility of ever getting rid of a patent application for good. The article, for example, describes how applicants work to wear an examiner down: "There is no way an examiner can ever cause a determined applicant to go away, though allowing the applicants patent claims will increase the chance that the case will finally be disposed of." When we were raising our kids, we subscribed to the strategies of John Rosemond. Rosemond was big on figuring out what "natural and logical consequences" would be for undesirable behavior. IOW, how do I make the child care more about their behavior than I do? I would suggest that one way to let patentees bear the burden of their bad choices would be to put their application at the bottom of the pile if they file a continuation. That creates space at the top for other applicants who have not yet had a shot at approval. It doesn't reject the application completely, it just rewards the continuation applicant with the natural and logical consequences of their strategy. Their decision - their delay. As it stands now, any consequences for continuations fall on everybody BUT the applicant. The applicant gets to go to the well until the bottom drops out of the bucket, but is still able to haul water in it. My proposal just allocates some of the delay to the applicant, who has created the situation by their own desires. They can take that into account when they decide whether to apply for a continuation or not. Their choice. If Rosemond's theories are correct, the applicants will find a way around this, just like children do. So we will have to find a different way of making them care about their misbehavior more than we do. And do not doubt for a second that it is misbehavior. They are using more than their fair share of resources, and are not playing nicely with others. This is antisocial behavior, and must not be tolerated, or civilization will come crumbling down around our ears. And before you know it, someone will be patenting rounded corners, rectangles and software. ;-) ---

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When you're chained to an oar you don't think you should go down when the galley sinks ? [ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: macliam on Monday, March 25 2013 @ 12:33 AM EDT

If you examine the continuations, you should find that the specification is the same for all of them. For example, I was looking at US6735249, US7149251 and US20070140342. And yes, if you look at the specifications, there might be an introductory sentence or so to say that you have a continuation. In these patents section of the the '251 patent entitled CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATION begins: This Application is a continuation of U.S. Patent Application… now U.S. Pat. No. 6,735,249. Then, in theory at least, the two patent specifications should continue to match up, word for word—until you reach the list of claims. Then the patent documents will diverge. The diagrams should also match up. Basically, the continuation just piles extra claims that read on the embodiment disclosed in the first patent (in this case the '249 patent). Basically, to people unfamiliar with patent law, the two inventions are the same invention. But, to patent lawyers and judges, each claim is a separate ‘invention’. You should find independent claims followed by lists of dependent claims that progressively narrow the scope of the claim. But otherwise, the claims are treated as separate inventions. A method or apparatus infringes one of these patents, provided that Nokia can prove that at least one patent claim reads on the allegedly infringing device, i.e., that the device matches the text of the claim as the claim language would be interpreted by a person having ordinary skill in the relevant art. To invalidate the claim, you need to prove that the specific claim reads on a device that was prior art back in 1999. It is no good just finding an example of ‘prior art’ that resembles the embodiment disclosed in the '249 specification. The degree of resemblence, or lack of resemblence, between the alleged infringing method or apparatus and the prior art method or apparatus and the embodiment disclosed in the '249 specification is totally irrelevant for purposes of determining infringement or proving invalidity. All that matters is whether or not the infringing technology or the prior art technology comes within the scope of the claim, when that claim is given its broadest interpretation consistent with the specification. Thus continuations are a way of piling on claim after claim to catch more allegedly infringing technologies in the net, or to provide fallbacks if claims previously made are invalidated. [ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 25 2013 @ 05:55 AM EDT

I'm so disappointed with Nokia :/

I can't say anything but micro$oft touch of death... and I feel no more

sentiment for nokia dying after their stupid move to windows 8.



The sad thing is that one can be sued for patents that he never knew about. So

in this case how can the patent be non-obvious? What is the rational behind

paying damages? [ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 25 2013 @ 06:47 AM EDT

If Nokia sues anybody who uses the wemb then they do not

have possibility to use webm at all in any devices. There

are some standards that will have webm as must and if Im not

wrong websocket is one of those. So if WP will implement

websocket then Nokia can not sell WP anymore.



Basicly only thing Google needs to do is force webm on

youtube for all mobile devices if its not the case already.

Problem solved. [ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: jesse on Monday, March 25 2013 @ 07:30 AM EDT

Appears to be what is commonly known as "dithering".



In this case, specifically to hide the edges of blocks of the image.



Dithering goes way back to WW2, done by motorized vibrators to allow more

precise bombing runs.





http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither

[ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 25 2013 @ 08:35 AM EDT

Before starting in on the "search" could someone please help

clarify two or three points for me: Nokia (a Microsoft partner) claims that their 'infringed'

patents are necessary for the new 'Standard' and will not

license these under any terms, SEP FRAND etc.. This is to kill

the 'new' standard - not to make money from it - maintaining

H.264 as their favoured "open and collaborative" method?

Does this mean that these same patents have been 'committed'

to Mpeg LA under the SEP rule as FRAND - since Nokia (even

as an MS partner and counter to MS interests?) did not

contribute to the patent pool - as the problems with such

members have already been overcome. Surely this means that they already successfully license

these as a part of H.264, SEP covered by FRAND (as Motorola)?

If not, then are they claiming that it is only the new VP8

Standard that infringes or would H.264 infringe if they

chose to assert them? How to view their relationship with other H.264 Patents -

as potential prior art against Nokia or vice versa

underpinning, or building on H.264 - bozo tweaks or what?

Do the Nokia Patents have to be stand on their own? Perhaps

in a sense as 'fundamental' to H.264 or can they be an

'intermediate' stage, themselves relying and building

on (and citing?) donated H.264 patents to give them their

"essential" aspect? Do individual "claims" have to be

seen as part of, within a standard or as "standalone claims"? As another complication, can the Nokia (non-MPEG LA)/MS

'partnership' alter any of these questions? Maybe not

directly in this case but in how these patents had previously

been asserted against, or licensed to members of MPEG LA

and on what basis - fair and non-discriminatory or

favourable to MS? [ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: feldegast on Monday, March 25 2013 @ 10:00 AM EDT

After ding a quick search on the 2 Australian patents I have some additional information



30275/01 -> http://pericles.ipaustralia.gov.au/ols/auspat/applicationDet ails.do?applicationNo=2001030275

Application number : 2001030275

Title : A method and associated device for filtering digital video images

Applicant(s) : Nokia Corporation

Inventor(s) : Aksu, Emre; Kalevo, Ossi; Karczewicz, Marta

Filing date : 2001-01-22

Application status : GRANTED



---------------------------------

2007311526 -> http://pericles.ipaustralia.gov.au/ols/auspt/applicationDetai ls.do?applicationNo=2007311526

Application number : 2007311526

Title : System and method for providing picture output indications in video coding

Applicant(s) : Nokia Corporation

Inventor(s) : Wang, Ye-Kui; Hannuksela, Miska

Filing date : 2007-08-29

Application status : GRANTED

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IANAL

My posts are ©2004-2013 and released under the Creative Commons License Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0

P.J. has permission for commercial use. [ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 25 2013 @ 12:18 PM EDT

Nokia is based in Finland. From Helsinki, the capital of

Finland, to Talinn, the capital of Estonia, is a two-hour

ferry ride. As I understand it, Finnish and Estonian (and

Hungarian-Magyar), form a language group unlike anything else

(can anybody elaborate in a reply?), so maybe some linguistic

subtleties can be buried in their patents. I'm also

interested that countries like Turkey and Vietnam are there.

Perhaps it has to do with the nationality of the employee

that produced the "idea". [ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 25 2013 @ 05:43 PM EDT

I took a look a this and, to me, it reads like poorly written,

poorly formatted gobbledygook with a few mathematical

equations thrown in. From what little I can make out of it,

it looks like another dithering scheme. [ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 25 2013 @ 08:42 PM EDT

Shouldn't we insist that an inventor wait until the innovation process is

complete before filling.



Take the example of two inventors both working on a similar device.

Traditionally who ever is smarter finishes first and gets the patent. What

companies are doing now is patenting before they finish the work to cut off

others that may be working on similar devices. [ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: macliam on Tuesday, March 26 2013 @ 05:47 AM EDT

Say you have a video of a ball rotating and flying through the air. You have a reference frame, and you want to encode a current frame (say) one second later. To construct the later frame, you divide up into 16x16 pixel 'segments'. For each segment, you find a portion of the previous image that bests matches the current image for that segment, and specify the coefficients a, b, c, d, e, f for a motion sending (x,y) to (a + cx + ey, b + dx + fy) that maps the current segment to the portion of the reference frame that most resembles it (which will probably be an image of the moving rotating ball at the earlier time whereever it was in the frame). Then you transmit the six motion coefficients (probably with other information that allows for improving the image). So far, this seems to be in the prior art. What makes this invention novel is that, instead of using the motion coefficients determined by the current frame, it may make sense to use those of the frame immediately to the left, or immediately above, suitably transformed. If you can do so, then you need to transmit less information. Therefore you determine which of the various methods (using coefficients calculating coefficients for the current frame, or reusing them from a frame to the left or above, assuming left to right, top to bottom encoding) gives the better compression, and then transmit data accordingly. So the following questions. Does the proposed standard do things this way? Is there any prior art teaching using using the affine motion model with transformed coeefficients from neighboring frames? Is there something else in one of Nokia's other claims teaching something different that might be infringed? [ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 26 2013 @ 11:47 AM EDT

htt p://pdf.aminer.org/000/389/918/constra ints_for_the_estimatio n_of_displacement_vector_fields_from_image.pdf < p>The article is, as far as I can tell, from 1983. It talks abouth oriented smoothness of vector field and minimization function. ABSTRACT

Smoothness constraints have been used to facilitate the estimation of displacement vector fields. Differing from HORN and SCHUNCK 81 who employ a general smoothness requirement, this contribution reports an analysis of an "oriented smoothness" requirement: a change in the displacement vector field is only constrained in the direction perpendicular to the characteristic gray value variation based on which the displacement vector is estimated. An iterative solution for the resulting system of nonlinear partial differential equations is developed. It is shown how this system of equations relates to the one derived by HORN and SCHUNCK 81. /Peter [ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 26 2013 @ 04:17 PM EDT

In order to find prior art I guess it would help to understand the claims of the

patents. [ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 26 2013 @ 07:35 PM EDT

1999 'state of the art' academic survey of compression techniques: application_of_the_minimum_description

_length_prin ciple_to_object_ori ented.pdf This paper from Roger J. Clarke

Department of Computing and Electrical Engineering,

Heriot-Watt University,Edinburgh

might help some of us to understand the state of the art about the

time that Nokia were filing the first patents. In particular,

there is an extensive list of references which might provide

links or leads to prior art - if you can gain access? [ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 26 2013 @ 07:37 PM EDT

Ideally we want prior art for every single claim in every single patent. That

is huge, however. The fear then is that we concentrate in some areas and not

others. As a first measure we should make sure that there is some prior art

against each "independent" claim. I've put together a list for each

patent and will post them separately so that it's easy to record where there is

something missing. [ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, March 27 2013 @ 01:20 AM EDT

There is a basic problem with claiming that the VP8 spec

infringes '249. '249 is an encoding-efficiency patent. VP8

is a decoding specification.



VP8 follows a very common practice in video codec standards

specifications: it defines a "reference decoder" and a

bitstream format. The specification tells you precisely what

images a compliant decoder will render when it receives any

specific valid bitstream. There are many different

bitstreams that result in the same (or nearly the same)

video playback. You, as a person building or writing an

encoder, may exhibit great cleverness in finding the

smallest bitstream which plays the video you're sending with

acceptable quality. Bully for you! The standard does not

*require* you to be clever about encoding, nor to be clever

in any particular way.



Thus encoding-efficiency techniques (like '249) are hardly

ever "standards-essential" for codecs, because the standard

doesn't require you to encode efficiently.



All three of '249's independent claims (1, 25, and 41)

specifically claim a method for choosing between two

alternative motion vector encodings. Even if the choice they

describe is possible in VP8 (I'm not convinced it is), there

is no need to make the choice in the manner they describe in

order to write an encoder.



In a different context, it might be considered responsible

citizenship for Nokia to let encoder-designers know that

some of the clever ideas they might come up with for

efficient encoding have been patented. However here, where

the implication seems to be "these patents are essential and

we won't license them", it is BS in the finest FUD

tradition.



IMHO we can cross '249 off the list of patents blocking VP8

adoption.

[ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, March 27 2013 @ 06:20 AM EDT

. Isn't this call Equitable Estoppel? Because these are old patents (mostly), which Nokia knew about and just when the IETF was to reach a consensus then up jump Nokia deciding to release these patents in a discriminated way to block VP8 adoption. [ Reply to This | # ]



Equitable Estoppel.. - Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, March 27 2013 @ 09:27 AM EDT

Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, March 27 2013 @ 10:30 AM EDT

Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 01:54 AM EDT