[vorbis] Re: Winamp5

[ChristianHJW]

Cameron Patrick wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 11:03:51AM -0600, noprivacy at earthlink.net wrote:
> 
> | And let's be blunt here.... Xiph can claim all they want that it's patent
> | free but in the commercial world, claims like that don't mean anything.
> | Somebody is going to have to put in some big bucks to do extensive
> | investigation to make sure they wont be likely to get sued.  Hopefully AOL
> | is doing that because once they do, then other commercial products might
> | decide to include vorbis encoding.
> 
> Patents don't work like that, sorry.  My understanding is that almost
> every non-trivial piece of code is highly likely to violate a software
> patent in the current situation.  Some claim that the best approach for
> software developers is to ignore any patents that aren't being actively
> enforced, simply because there are so many overly broad software patents
> around, many of which the owners don't really care about.  Now Vorbis is
> unlikely to be covered by a patent which /is/ being actively enforced,
> as if it was, we'd know about it by know (on account of its owner
> politely telling Xiph.org to pay up).  Furthermore, large companies like
> AOL can generally protect themselves reasonably well from patent
> lawsuits, simply because they themselves have many patents which they
> can start bandying about in retaliation ("You say we're violating your
> patent there?  Well let's see how many patents of /ours/ you're using...
> Perhaps we should forget about this whole nasty business.")

Let me add that i once had the chance to read a very expensive software 
patent research, done by a huge US patent bureau ( sorry, i cant tell 
you more ). The result was, that they expected that more than 90% of the 
existing software patents would not hold in a real patent trial, mainly 
because for many of them its easy to prove that they themselves are 
based on other existing patents !
Furthermore, most patent owners dont ever think of using their patents 
to force them on other companies, who might violate them, but the main 
reason to apply for a software patent is to try to avoid to get sued by 
other, competing companies, who could claim their technology is used in 
their software products. So, applying for a software patent is mainly 
done to try to be on the safe side against getting sued, rather than 
trying to enforce them on others ...

Christian
matroska project admin

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