Codecs and Software Patents - Part X - Florian Müller Still Muddying the Waters for FOSS, Using Software Patents
Some things never change...
So AV1 has been adopted by GNU for its videos. It all happened in recent weeks.
"The main reason I wanted to flag all of this though," said a person associated with this effort, "is that I suspect the current round of AV1 coverage may be of particular interest to you. With Dolby's lawsuit against Snap and the renewed discussion around codec patents, I came across an number of pieces by Florian Müller — someone you know quite well, I quickly learned. My first instinct was to search his name on the sites, and that led me through a few dozen of your old articles about him. He seems to be pretty widely hated in the free software (and even "open source") world. He seems to be reappearing around this subject in a fairly predictable way, but in just about all the major news articles I could find about the current legal landscape. What stood out to me wasn't so much the lawsuits themselves, but the broader effort to cast sweeping doubt on AV1's royalty-free status. AV1 actually has a stronger litigation track record than VP9 at this point - patent challenges against it have been invalidated at the EPO, in Japan, and in China - and stood all the way up to the supreme courts. And beyond the courts, the structure of AOMedia itself is worth considering: when the member roster represents roughly half of the United States' GDP, there is very little incentive for any of those companies to let a patent troll destabilize the codec they've all collectively bet on. It's not blind faith in Big Tech - it's mutual interest working in the same direction as computing freedom, at least on this particular issue of major importance."
"At the end of the day, codecs are math — and you cannot patent math. That isn't just philosophy; it's settled law. Different codecs use different mathematical approaches, but that's all they are. It's hard to charitably interpret a claim like Muller's [Florian Müller] coming from someone with his credentials and track record. Someone with that level of expertise doesn't accidentally conflate codec similarity with patent exposure - which makes the intent behind statements like that worth scrutinizing."
So according to this, there's more FUD and scare-mongering than actual risk. At a later point we'll examine or revisit the stance of Richard Stallman on this.
We wrote quite a lot about Florian Müller in the past. Regardless of what he did two decades ago, these days he's boosting Microsoft and patent trolls. █
Previously:
Image source: through the grapevine - Plan9