On 25 Jun 2007, at 13:21, Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves wrote:
According to Wikipedia,
"AT&T is trying to sue companies such as Apple Inc. over alleged
MPEG-4 patent infringement.[1][2][3]"
I would be fascinated to see a statement from Apple, Inc. regarding
this.
Seeming they are already under risk from what they already support,
what advantage do Apple get by supporting more codecs, therefore
opening up themselves to further risks?
It's also quite interesting that different portions of MPEG-4,
including different sections of video and audio are licensed
separately, so what this means is that any vendor willing to support
MPEG-4 for <video> and <audio> has to locate every patent holder and
pay them.
No, they don't, it all goes through MPEG-LA.
Oh, and will you look at this, Apple, Inc. holds one the patents! US
6,134,243 [4]. So Apple gets money for every single license sold.
How nice. They are attempting to lock vendors into MPEG-4 and get
money from licenses in the process. Apple, Inc. is no better than
Microsoft.
So a company which owns a patent on a standard that can bought and
read at freedom is just as bad as a company which owns a patent on a
standard that has absolutely no public documentation? Also, a large
part of this topic has been around H.264, Apple holds no known
patents affecting H.264.
- Geoffrey Sneddon
