[Vorbis] patent issues with Vorbis

[Ralph Giles]

On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 12:04:07PM -0800, Dan Hollis wrote:

> Someone from fraunhofer publically stated many (many) years ago they 
> believed vorbis infringed on mp3 patents. However they have not to date 
> filed any infringement suits.

Yes, Henri Linde, Vice President of new business at Thompson.[1]
In addition to Thompson/Fraunhofer never suing, he later retracted
the statements. This was discussed on the theora list recently.[2]

> The law takes a _very_, _VERY_ dim view of companies who are aware of 
> infringement but _deliberately_ choose to do nothing until many years 
> later. As is the current situation with fraunhofer/mp3licensing. (except 
> that in this case, they _still_ have not filed any claims).

Really? I know this is the case with trademark law, where there is a 
burden of active defence on the rights holder, but I'd never heard of 
it in connection with patent law. As with copyright, selective 
enforcement seems to happen all the time.

If this is in fact the case, why was the sudden enforcement of the 
Unisys LZW patents, which happened only in the last 10 years of their 
validity, a problem with the gif image file format?

 -r