- From: David Dailey <david.dailey@sru.edu>
- Date: Fri, 09 Nov 2007 11:06:27 -0500
- To: Dave Singer <singer@apple.com>,public-html@w3.org
At 10:24 AM 11/9/2007, Dave Singer wrote: >I was asked to write up the discussion on codecs we had. Here are >my notes. This probably should be wiki-ed somewhere? Thanks Dave for your lucid presentation of the matter. Ultimately some of the "deep pockets" you allude to may be nervous about Ogg because of submarine patents. The issue has come up that it is not feasible to determine that a given technology (albeit ostensibly open-source) is in fact unencumbered by patents. What you have written may well imply this, but it certainly would be nice if the December workshop could directly investigate this feasibility, since it seems to have direct bearing on the entire Royalty Free disposition of the W3C. Perhaps in the context of a particular codec or two, an exhaustive patent search would in fact prove to be a finite effort. Inviting the relevant license holders to the table seems like an excellent idea. Additionally, it may prove worthwhile for the December workshop to re-examine the proposition that inter-operability of the video tag would be substantially harmed through adoption of more than one standard -- for example MPEG-4 for the deeper pockets and Ogg/Theora for the shallower ones. Third, if the existing patents for cross-frame video compression have effectively "sewed up" the market and left no room for new inventions, then it would seem that the "non-obvious" clause of the patent requirement might effectively void a part of the scope of such patents. If not, then might the December meeting spend a wee bit of its time identifying and claiming some of the fertile ground that remains for the development of extensions / revisions of the nonproprietary formats that would effectively allow us to step around the IP landmines. Most would probably agree that an IP regimen which makes the presence of landmines undetectable is not productive. A letter from the W3C to WIPO acknowledging such might provide some incentive for more enlightened international harmonization of IP. The former concern is more of a legal one; the second: more technical; the third: a curious hybrid of both. Thanks again for your concise and, seemingly, thorough presentation. David Dailey
Received on Friday, 9 November 2007 16:06:28 UTC