[Vorbis] Nokia against the adoption of the Ogg technologies by W3C's HTML5

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Dec 13, 2007 11:54 PM, Thy <thy at cult-of-noise.net> wrote:
> https://linuxfr.org/~thy_Nae/25816.html
>
> I posted this chat about nokia in the french speaking linux site
> "LinuxFR.org".
> It seems that:
> 1st: It's not Nokia, but an employee of nokia who claims that.

The position paper specifically identified itself as being the
position of Nokia with text like "Nokia's recommendation".

Perhaps the employee was acting outside of his authority or there was
some other confusion, but Nokia has not yet issued a retraction.

> 2nd: More than an anti-vorbis attitude, Nokia ('s employee) attitude is a
> security against sleeping patents who can cover ogg&vorbis, also, other
> technologie like h264 aren't treathed by sleeping patent and there's less
> danger in legal issue to use them.

The nature of the patent system is that the absolute risk of
litigation is effectively unknowable.

Sometimes you can get an approximate measure of the relative risks
between different approaches.  No one has publicaly posted a strong
argument why there would be more risk for Theora and Vorbis and in
fact to the extent that we KNOW the relative risks, we know of
examples where the encumbered competition IS vulnerable.

Several of the mpeg la licensed codecs are have already been victims
of patent litigation.  The same is not true for any of the Xiph
codecs.

The patent arguments thus far have amounted to arm waving and
innuendo. The same could be said for any software, so it is not a
useful input to the discussion.

> Please note
> - that I'm a french speaking guy and please pardon my low-level English :-)

Then I hope you will pardon my complete inability to speak French. :)

> - It's not really my opinion (Microsoft itself used ogg in his video game
> "Halo" and samsung/yepp class digital player (my actual player) use
> ogg/vorbis whitout problems, but a short synthese of the discussions who
> follows my topic.

It is an interesting subject, to say the least.