Codecs and Software Patents - Part V - A Reminder That GAFAM and the European Patent Office (Which Serves American Monopolists) Do Considerable Harm to the Commons and Culture
Back in March: GAFAM Mozilla Removes Theora Support, Now GNU Needs to Re-encode Videos
At the end of last month we wrote about drama at the European Patent Office (EPO), which is governed by a sort of "mafia" - to use the term insiders use - with cocaine and sex scandals (which they try to cover up). Money gets plundered, embezzled, misused, and funneled towards bribes. All of us who value the integrity of European politics are deeply concerned.
What does this have to do with this series? We'll explain this in the coming few days.
Why not sooner? Because there are some 'breaking' developments. In Europe, there are very obvious culprits and they've even hijacked the patent tribunals (their staff serving as judges).
First, following Blackberry's transformation or transition to patent trolling we see the Malikie HEVC patent challenged. We took note of this in Daily Links some days ago:
On May 2, 2025, Unified filed an ex parte reexamination proceeding against U.S. Patent 10,778,989, another patent owned by Malikie Innovations Limited, an NPE and entity of Key Patent Innovations Limited. The ‘989 patent, formerly assigned to Blackberry Ltd., relates to a rolling intra prediction video codec method based on the H.264/AVC/HEVC standards.
In case it's not obvious, "NPE" means patent troll and it is fronting for a company (because it's harder to sue trolls; they acquire a sort of immunity by indirection).
"One of the biggest reasons that they are trying to force MPEG-4 AVC off the web now is that the patents are expiring," Ryan wrote this morning in IRC. "Three more AVC patents issued in the US expire this month alone."
They try to get more fools to pay "protection money" (license, pay "royalties").
"Back when MPEG4 was just starting and Ogg was a thing," a reader has since then recalled, "I debated with some Nokia developers. They could not see anything except MPEG4 and it was basically impossible to get minds around a patent-free standard as that would mean *not* paying royalties. The idea of not paying royalties was so foreign to them that they could not understand it."
"I wonder how the AV1 patents tie into the removal of Ogg Theora by Mozilla. There is likely more than just censorship by removing access to old, open standard videos."
See the article cited above. Mozilla is part of the problem, not the solution, as it's outsourcing to GAFAM (Microsoft), it is funded by GAFAM, and it barely resembles what it used to be.
In the coming few parts we'll discuss Nokia, Microsoft, IBM, and some of the other more prominent culprits. They also use patent trolls as proxies in Europe.
Later on we plan to discuss what this means to GNU and the FSF (which is why we talked about Ogg being "deprecated" in more recent months, citing libreplanet-discuss exchanges). █