08.13.15
Gemini version available ♊︎Cisco: When a Patent Troll (by Some Criteria) Claims to be Against Patent Trolls, Has Much Left to Prove
Summary: Analysis of Cisco’s claims that it is making a new video codec ‘royalty-free’ in an effort to fight trolls (probably MPEG-LA et al.)
Cisco, itself somewhat of a troll these days (reversal of a previous stance and previous actions), is trying very hard to paint itself ‘anti-trolls’ right now (picked by LWN by now), leading to misleading press coverage like “Cisco hands license-busting troll-hammer to THOR”. To quote:
Cisco is sick of the state of patent licensing for video codecs, so has decided to set a royalty-free of its own loose on the world.
The Borg’s problem is twofold: on the one hand, the licensing pools for H.264 fail to represent many of the participants in the industry; on the other, the successor, H.265, can be vastly more expensive.
Is Cisco ever going to stand up to MPEG-LA? Cisco enters a space already populated by Google’s WebM/VP9 and Ogg Theora/Vorbis (here is Monty Montgomery’s initial response to Cisco making its codec free, but not Free software like his own ‘baby’). It would be nice to see Cisco throwing its weight against MPEG-LA, and by extension MPEG-LA backers such as Apple and Microsoft. Some sites frame Cisco’s software as “H.264 and H.265 alternative”. Let’s see how they cope with the patent troll, MPEG-LA. Sooner or later we are bound to find out.
It is no secret that Techrights distrusts Cisco, even for reasons other than patents. Today in the news there are damaging allegations about (and also from) Cisco. Cisco claims that its gear can be hijacked (Cisco’s very own back door must not have helped and instead contributed to it). Perhaps Cisco found out that letting only the “Good Guys” get into everything from Cisco rarely works in practice. Cisco is a back doors industry leader, with public attempt to even standardise the practice and Web pages that boast about it (Cisco may have removed or watered down these pages since the Snowden-provided leaks). Does anyone wish to actually use Cisco products, irrespective of the codecs used, to transmit audio and video inside a private business? Sensitive data is being passed around, making it an attractive target for espionage. Cisco gear is a bug waiting to be remotely accessed (or its communications intercepted) by Cisco’s partners in high places, such as the NSA. Remember that Cisco’s stacks are almost entirely proprietary, no matter how much openwashing the company habitually resorts to. █
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