10.05.10

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Opera Rejects Software Patents and Vincent Van Quickenborne (Minister of Economy) Quick to Push Them Into Europe

Posted in Apple, Europe, Free/Libre Software, Patents at 3:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Europe’s leading Web browser rejects the patent trolls who sell H.264 licences and Vincent Van Quickenborne gets accused of lying “about open source and software patents”

THE Norway-based Opera is as smart as Mozilla when it comes to video/audio codecs. Opera was one of the early pushers for Ogg support in Web browsers and eventually it got its way, despite resistance from Nokia, Apple, and the likes of them. Opera and Mozilla support Ogg right now and WebM support is coming soon. “Opera still won’t support H.264 video,” says this new article and it must be due to MPEG-LA patents (H.264 is still not free for Web usage and it’s handled by an active patent troll).

Despite H.264 announcing it would go royalty free, Opera says the standard isn’t open enough for them to support it

In late August this year the MPEG Licensing Authority (MPEG LA), a body which licenses pools of patents for various standards, announced that it wouldn’t charge royalty fees for Internet video that streams to end users for free.

Previously MPEG LA had said they wouldn’t charge royalties for such video until after 31 December 2015, but now it appears that this will be extended into perpetuity.

This move by the MPEG LA wasn’t welcomed by everyone however, with Mozilla speaking out against the move and questioning the relevance of the H.264 standard beyond 2014.

Mr. Quickenborne, whom we wrote about back in July, is still on the side of the likes of MPEG-LA considering the fact that he wilfully (perhaps knowingly) opens the door to software patents in Europe and, according to this new video, he also “lies about open source and software patents”. From the video’s summary:

Belgian EU Presidency lies about open source and software patents

Belgian Minister of Economy, Vincent Van Quickenborne, was interviewed about software patents in the Radio show “RTBF Matin Premiere”, lying about the current situation in Europe about software patents. In fact, the central EU patent court he is pushing has great chances to validate the practice of the European Patent Office (EPO) to grant software patents.

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