EU Antitrust Regulators Probing Tech Group AOM's Video Licensing Policy (reuters.com) 15
EU antitrust regulators are investigating the video licensing policy of the Alliance for Open Media (AOM), whose members include Alphabet Google, Amazon, Apple and Meta , the European Commission said on Thursday. Reuters reports: Founded in 2015, the group aims to create a new standard software for streaming higher-quality 4K video on browsers, devices, apps, and gaming, known as AV1. While the AV1 software is not yet adopted widely, Netflix and YouTube have started using it for some customers, and browsers such as Google Chrome and Firefox have started to support the new format. Intel, Huawei, Mozilla, Samsung and Nvidia are also AOM members, according to its website.
In a questionnaire sent to some companies earlier this year and seen by Reuters, the EU watchdog said it was investigating alleged anti-competitive behavior related to the license terms of AV1 by AOM and its members in Europe. "The Commission has information that AOM and its members may be imposing licensing terms (mandatory royalty-free cross licensing) on innovators that were not a part of AOM at the time of the creation of the AV1 technical, but whose patents are deemed essential to (its) technical specifications," the paper said. It said this action may be restricting the innovators' ability to compete with the AV1 technical specification, and also eliminate incentives for them to innovate.
The questionnaire also asked about the impact of an AOM patent license clause in which licensees would have their patent licenses terminated immediately if they launched patent lawsuits asserting that implementation infringes their claims. Companies risk fines of up to 10% of their global turnover for breaching EU antitrust rules.
In a questionnaire sent to some companies earlier this year and seen by Reuters, the EU watchdog said it was investigating alleged anti-competitive behavior related to the license terms of AV1 by AOM and its members in Europe. "The Commission has information that AOM and its members may be imposing licensing terms (mandatory royalty-free cross licensing) on innovators that were not a part of AOM at the time of the creation of the AV1 technical, but whose patents are deemed essential to (its) technical specifications," the paper said. It said this action may be restricting the innovators' ability to compete with the AV1 technical specification, and also eliminate incentives for them to innovate.
The questionnaire also asked about the impact of an AOM patent license clause in which licensees would have their patent licenses terminated immediately if they launched patent lawsuits asserting that implementation infringes their claims. Companies risk fines of up to 10% of their global turnover for breaching EU antitrust rules.
Fucking Margarethe Vestager again ... (Score:3, Informative)
That idiot - who is currently both President of the European Commission and Commissioner for Competition - has wasted uncountable millions of euros in her vendetta against Google thus far. She's persuaded the Commission to levy billions of euros in fines against Alphabet and the Goog, only to have the EU's High Court throw them out.
Now she's training her sights on AV1 - which is a royalty-free, 21st-century, high-efficiency codec for video designed specifically to compete with the MP4 Alliance's royalty-laden, incredibly-restrictive product to the benefit of everyone on the planet, because why, exactly ... ?
Somewhat like the GPL (Score:2)
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As I understand it, its basically saying that if you file patent claims against AV1, you loose the rights to use all the patents in the AV1 patent pool.
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Re: Somewhat like the GPL (Score:3)
I fail to see a downside to that.
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I think what the EU is arguing is that because AV1 is quickly becoming something that companies need to support in their hardware (due to its growing popularity for content distribution by various players in that space) the licensing is unfair since the companies who are forced into supporting AV1 are also forced into giving up rights to any patents that apply to AV1 (which supposedly creates a disincentive for these companies to "innovate" and create the next great idea in video encoding)
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Soo... don't file patent claims against AV1 and you get to use it for free? The whole point was to create a critical mass of patents to prevent others from filing claims against AV1. I think the problem is the AOM licenses are not compliant with FRAND rules.
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That's exactly the problem, these companies have put effort into developing (and patenting) some video codec related thing and now they are stuck. They can either not implement AV1 (which lets them sue others using their patent but means they are unable to support playback of AV1 content on their devices) or they can implement AV1 and get playback of AV1 content but are then forced to give away these patents to their competitors.
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so they should have their cake and eat it too?
> but are then forced to give away these patents to their competitors.
I'd read it as only in the context of AV1. If a competitor uses their patent for another thing, pull out your lawyers. But what do I know... I just want a royalty free codec to succeed.
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Sounds to me like someone from MPEG whined to their buddy in the EU.
If they had a robust claim to file against AV1, they would do it.
What these other patent trolls want is to make settlements with smaller players who can't afford to risk losing a court battle. They don't want to go up against anyone who has a chance at a proper defense, with motivation to invalidate their patents.
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Nobody forces any hardware company to support anything.
It's up to the individual companies if it's a feature they have which their competitors may or may not also have.
Similar to how no hardware company was forced to pay for licensing to have hardware encoding / decoding of h.264. If you don't and your competitor does, and you dont get the sales, tough luck to you.
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Indeed, funny how when something becomes so ubiquitous that supporting it is basically mandatory, but it comes with patent and other fees to some random third party such as HDMI (-- $0.15 , plus optionally $0.04 per unit for HDCP. Source wikipedia) or MPEG-LA , no one sees an issue; but when it is some other clause, suddenly its "they're forced to adhere to the licence, antitrust!"
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MPEG2 is out-of-patent as far as I can tell so how exactly would that apply. Or is your post about Samsung referring to the modern MPEG standards (H.264, H.265 etc)?
A Case Of NIH? (Score:1)
Perhaps the EU elite in Brussels are bent out of shape by the fact that this concept was not invented in Europe?
You know...a case of "Not Invented Here" (NIH), thus it must be bad and therefore must be investigated and punished to the fullest extent of the laws and regulations that we have yet to write. In the mean time we will look for ways to tax it.