Steve Jobs: All video codecs are covered by patents. A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other “open source” codecs now
blogs.fsfe.org/hugo/2010/04/open-letter-to-st...
blogs.fsfe.orgPosted Apr 30, 2010, 4:00 PM UTC
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blogs.fsfe.orgJobs is the devil.
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[deleted]
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How exactly does his response make him a douche?
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Because he's implied that he's going to sue open source codec's one by one until h.264 is the only one left.
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No he didn't. He never said he was part of the patent pool.
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Hahah, patents are evil unless it's for Apple?
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No, patents are evil, but this has nothing to do with any of Apples patents.
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Wait, is Jobs actually instigating or assisting in this legal attack?
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Yeah, I think everyone in this thread is way off base, and misreading the info.
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Reddit loves a good Apple bashing.
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- Reddit is open source.
- Open source doesn't hurt anyone, it's the code of the people. So the rule is simple: Don't spread FUD on open source, because it doesn't hurt you. If you do, Reddit will call you out on it.
Jobs violated this rule, which especially stings even more because his lackluster company wouldn't be around today if it wasn't for open source helping it off its feet. I say a good Apple bashing is in order.
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Indeed it does, but this is classic FUD. He said that a patent pool is being assembled - that's fear. He didn't specify who - that's uncertainty and doubt. Jobs deserves it this time.
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I think it's just about time to boot this megalomaniac.
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If there is a devil, then who is the god?
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RMS. The only guy who has been right the whole time.
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if man is 5
then the devil is 6
then god is 7
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then god is seven...gooood is seven...then goood is seven!
This monkey's gone to heaven.
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Cause 7 8 9!!!
Fuck me and my "Dexter's Laboratory"-filled brain.
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Please don't insult the devil.
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I wouldn't go that far. He's a bit of a hypocritical cunt, but he's not the devil.
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Who did Steve's transplanted liver come from, Patrick Bateman?
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I do hope this is fake. After the San Mateo PD bullshit, I wouldn't put it past him.
When did Jobs decide to go from "Generic Evil" to full blown "Ballmer ain't got nothing on me Bitches!" Evil?
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Is it necessarily Apple that's assembling this patent pool though? Given their attacks on HTC, it's in the realm of possibility, but still.
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Exactly this. A "patent pool" is an association of different companies with patents covering parts of a technology. It makes sense that Jobs wouldn't enumerate all of the companies assembling said pool in a short letter like this, and there's actually no implication here that Apple is involved with such efforts.
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Given that he's pushing H.264, which Apple owns patents on, and that "Theora and other 'open source' codecs" present competition to it, I think it's a pretty safe to assume that Apple may be involved in trying to scuttle them.
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Yes, it's safe to assume that they may be, which is what BaronVonMannsechs said. But what Jobs said does not imply one way or the other.
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Of course, a few hundred other entities also own H264 patents.
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Yes, that's the patent pool for H.264. It's well known that Apple is part of that consortium. We're talking about the allegedly forming patent pool for Theora.
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Yes, but it WAS Apple that had the San Mateo Police Dept raid the Gizmodo guys house THREE DAYS after he had returned the damn phone. That is just pure bullshit.
Cue Jon Stewart: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-april-28-2010/appholes
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That has nothing to do with anything I said.
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How is that bullshit? Apple is a billion dollar company and that was a stolen prototype. Sheesh.
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Yes, but it WAS Apple that had the San Mateo Police Dept raid the Gizmodo guys house THREE DAYS after he had returned the damn phone.
Fascinating. So Apple has taken over the role normally given to the public prosecutor/DA, yes?
Hint: Private companies do not run criminal investigations; the state does. If Apple were using the police to collect evidence for a civil suit, that'd be noteworthy, but it's perfectly normal for the state to use police to collect evidence for a criminal prosecution.
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Since microsoft attacked HTC right after apple did there is some chance they are working together to go after linux, android and other open source projects.
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Unlikely. It looks, right now, like there has been a spurt of activity in phone-related patent lawsuits. It started with Nokia going after Apple, then Apple went after Nokia and HTC... And soon, they'll all be at it, to demonstrate "I have patents too, so you don't want to sue ME!" Keeps patent lawyers in food and clothing, but otherwise rather pointless.
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He didn't say Apple was in the patent pool, he just said there was one.
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There isn't a patent pool though. The Theora devs have explicitly said that no one has contacted them about any patent problems. So either Apple seeks to create one or Steve jobs lied and is creating FUD.
If apple is not in the patent pool, that's because there is none. Jobs lied about it's existence. So, either way, fuck Jobs.
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There isn't a patent pool though. The Theora devs have explicitly said that no one has contacted them about any patent problems.
Such things often wait in the shadows until they're ready.
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But is he actually being truthful or just being a FUD factory? He conveniently fails to name names.
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He's always been a cunt.
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Good, the Theora devs have been asking for such a patent pool for years so they can either find previous art or remove/hack around the part of code that use patents.
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It's a good thing Apple is such a savior of Open Source...
What was it Jon Stewart said the other night:
"How'd we get to the point where Apple is getting doors kicked down while Bill Gates is off curing Malaria?"
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Gates bailed, and left Ballmer running the war. And iirc, there are some issue with how the gates foundation deals with discoveries under its funding.
anyways, with apple getting police to kick in doors, and a media corporation spokesman saying he likes child porn for its ability to get politicians to sign of on draconian measures, i say the world is turning very cyberpunk, very quickly.
Heck, lets not forget ACTA. Are we looking at the dawn of Corporate feudalism? Or is it about to turn high noon?
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In my opinion, high noon.
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By the by, I still need two samurai and a rigger for a run into the OZ backend at 0dark30.
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I know a street samurai that would be interested. ;)
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My recollection is that after Gate's anti-trust testimony he was fired from MS and sentenced to a lifetime of community service.
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Good luck getting the open source clients off the internet there mister black turtleneck.
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He doesn't have to get them off the internet, just his phone...
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Steve Jobs: The new Darl McBride?
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Good comparison, but Darl McBride is appealing compared to Jobs. Jobs repels me to an astonishing degree and always has. His narcissism knows no boundaries.
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The situations are different. The whole SCO lawsuit things came just at the point the Linux was starting to be a big viable alternative. I have first hand knowledge of scared CTOs who canceled linux plans and projects. I'm not saying that linux would have a 50% desktop share today without it, but it would have more than it does now.
It's no doubt a dick move by Jobs, but despite the hype the "Free" video codecs aren't used by anyone but a small group who uses them on principle. The codecs are quite poor in the cases that matter to most uses.
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McBride is obviously a complete douchebag.
But I still maintain that he's not a patch on Jobs. Keep in mind that the SCO story is finished, whereas Apple has only begun to throw its weight around...
Prediction: They will make the worst behavior of Microsoft look like the behavior of hippies at the drum circle before all is said and done.
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What are these cases? I can only think of no hardware support and a somewhat higher amount of processing needed to decode them.
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The cases are the "important" ones on the internet. Studies can be found either way with specific scenes, but H.264 handles motion much better in general. Ars did a good review of the two a while back:
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/02/ogg-theora-vs-h264-head-to-head-comparisons.ars
In my mind the Ars editors would have loved to come on the side of Theora if they could. So in the case of low (less than 1 Mbit/s) video that is common on the internet, Theora doesn't look as good. And on the high side (HD at greater than 8 Mbit/s) the lack of hardware support means difficulty with stutter free playback. They compete fairly well in the middle, but so do other standards like MPEG-2.
Oh and Happy Birthday.
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Well, Jobs does have a point. H.264 is an Open Standard, but its not free.
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A lot of people seem to be interpreting this as "Apple is assembling a patent pool ..." which I can understand due to Jobs' use of passive voice. But by definition, a patent pool is an association of several companies, and until negotiations are finished, it's ambiguous what companies will be a member of said association. This, I think, is likely why Jobs says "is being assembled" rather than "X and Y are assembling a patent pool".
Now, if Apple is in fact heading up the efforts to assemble said pool, then that's pretty evil. But we have no real reason to believe that this is the case.
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I don't think there is an patent pool. People are calling him out for demanding openness to use it against Adobe while torpedoing Theora as standard for HTML5. This is classic Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.
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This is classic Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.
The thing is, in all likelihood, Theora does infringe some patents, because there are just a tremendous number of patents covering a ridiculous breadth of concepts. And those patents are probably ridiculous and should be invalid, but that doesn't mean the law will see it that way.
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If you want to look at it that way then you can say the same thing about H.264 or any other codec... singling out Theora as if it's an exception to such a ubiquitous problem is still FUD.
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All video codecs are covered by patents.
How is that singling out Theora? The only reason he mentioned Theora specifically is that the open letter he was responding to mentioned Theora specifically.
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My father actually own a patent on "sending data through multiple computers' or something to that affect...
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Your intelligent breakdown of this situation is going to fall on deaf ears. Everyone wants to hate on apple now after the iphone situation.
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I'm just happy to hate on Apple because it's a large US corporation.
What other reason does one need?
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we need to assemble a committee to determine at what net worth a corporation becomes evil
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We have a new champion!
Steve Jobs in now "The Most Evil Technology Executive on the Planet!"
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[deleted]
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I will not complain either that you like Openness so much that when you use “Open Source” Software to build your Mac operating system, you keep all the openness for yourself and don’t give it to your customers, nor to the developers whose works have been very useful to you.
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Steve Jobs is a fuckin idiot, I cant stand that guy.
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'Sent from my Ipad' - that made me laugh
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That's probably why the email is so short.
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This better be a hoax to get traffic.
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[deleted]
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2011 is the year of Linux as evil.
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Who else in the linux world is evil right now?
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Torvalds can get some pretty good rants going once in a while.
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[deleted]
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Microsoft is still the same microsoft. They have a new ally in apple.
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As far as I can tell, all the big "game changers" of software have been available for free. I could be wrong, I'm sure you can come up with examples that aren't free (ex: Photoshop). But look at this list, and tell me patents are necessary for innovation:
html mp3 divx torrent flash FUCKING LINUX
Software patents just slow down progress. There's no way single organization can advance a method of obtaining a result more than the entirety of world's interested parties.
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MP3 is patent-encumbered.
Most likely, patents have been issued that all your remaining items would violate.
Patents approach logical absurdity, and they are the law of the land. There is nothing good about this.
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Man, I really hate seeing patents used to stifle competition and progress. It seems to be too common in the tech industry.
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Theora is known to be covered by On2 patents, but On2 granted an unrevocable free license to those patents for use in Theora. This seems to be suggesting that there are other patents that have yet to be identified which also cover Theora.
If this is true, what's to say there aren't other patents that cover H.264 which aren't currently part of the MPEG-LA licensing cost? Whose to say that XYZ Patent Troll Inc. won't come up and start trying to charge $200 per H.264 decoder distributed?
Until someone can identify new patents that might apply to Theora, I'm calling this FUD.
your probably right. Heck, after finding out that apple (along with microsoft and other, more quiet corporations) have vested interests in the licensing of mpeg4, this is starting to look much the same as the FUD campaign microsoft is running against anything linux.
i wonder, do this mean they are, for lack of a better word, scared?
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs being scared is something that brings me comfort. Seriously.
Sorry but Gates is gone remember? It's the two Steves now, Ballmer and Jobs.
Fuuuuck. I didn't even have a clue. Thanx for the insight.
That what submarine patent are called for. You can't easily identify them.
I don't think that word means what you think it means: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_patent
(in particular: After the law was changed all the submarines were forced to surface)
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/by3dr/ie9_html5_video_will_play_h264_only/c0p5pum
That comment has a number of incorrect claims. E.g. that a litigant has to go through the MPEG-LA first. The AVC license has all upper-case admonishments no less than four times that there is no expressed or implied promise that it is inclusive of all the essential patents, much less whatever non-essential patents you might infringe in the coarse of producing an implementation.