Bonum Certa Men Certa

[Video] Apple Still Unleashes Software Patent Menaces That Can Discourage Adoption of GNU/Linux

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 09, 2024

Video download link | md5sum b34948b9cc73799a31e64e6c1530ab8a
Apple Patent Traps
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Preview for Apple Patent Traps

THE software patents' menace remains unaddressed, even here in Europe. The EPO grants them more than ever (it got even worse when Benoît Battistelli left the EPO to his friend António Campinos). No amount of patent squashing can catch up with the rapid pace of granting. It takes a lot of time and money to undo a bad patent grant.

With that in mind, as "HEIC is now Apple's default format AFAIK" (according to an associate), where do we stand on image formats? As I explain in the video, Apple seems to go out of its way to make things incompatible with GNU/Linux and in Europe we hear of GNU/Linux developers facing legal threats (blackmail) using software patents on multimedia formats. This is actually happening and Apple plays a role, too. In the case of HEIC, the official page says, under "Do I need a License?", that "You most likely need a license if you sell any products that have HEVC/H.265 encoding and/or decoding capability/functionality."

Another page covers aspects such as cost: "We make software that is free for users to download. Do we need a License?"

"In general," it says, "HEVC software downloaded by users requires a license. However, there are some situations wherein a license is not needed."

We wrote about the "HEVC cartel" in the distant past. It is one of several such cartels. Another one is being challenged right now in the US. From yesterday:

On July 3, 2024, Unified Patents filed an ex parte reexamination proceeding against U.S. Patent 10,574,982, owned by GE Video Compression, LLC. The ‘982 patent monopoly generally relates to encoding and decoding video images using wedgelet, or binary mask, patterns.

And MPEG-LA also:

On July 3, 2024, five weeks after Unified filed an ex parte reexamination on the fourth OptiMorphix owned patent, the Central Reexamination Unit (CRU) granted Unified’s request, finding substantial new questions of patentability on the challenged claims of U.S. Patent 7,987,285.

Just because the media doesn't talk about those things doesn't mean they're a solved problem. Far from it!

Apple's role in spreading patented formats deserves more frequent scrutiny.

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