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Harm to standards and compatibility
Patents harm standards and compatibility by blocking the inclusion of necessary or important functionality.
Standards and compatibility are essential for software - more so than other fields. If a word processor or a video player cannot read popular document or video formats, it is simply not a functional word processor or video player. Reading other formats and protocols, regardless of how innovative, will not suffice to fulfil the role of being a document reader or video player.
Contents
Standards with patent problems
- GIF used to have patent problems when using LZW compression. These patents are now expired.
- Multimedia Home Platform
- HTML5
- Jpeg2000 - the web standard that many worked on but nobody used
- mpeg (mp3 and mpeg video)
- OOXML - a Microsoft document format
- OpenGL 3
- TLS-authz
- H.264
- IPv6
- Real Media - audio and video formats with patent problems[1]
- ISO 9660 Rock Ridge Interchange Protocol - afflicted by the Microsoft FAT patents[2]
- mp3
- GSM
- G.729, G.722, and G.723.1
Related pages on ESP Wiki
- audio-video patents
- Interoperability exceptions - a legislative idea for a partial victory
- Harm with neither litigation nor threats
- Patenting around what will become essential
- Patent ambush (also discusses submarine patents)
- Inequality between small and large patent holders
External links
General articles
- The problems of patents in standards, by Bruce Perens
- Analysis on balance: Standardisation and Patents, by Georg Greve
- Microsoft's Open Specification Promise: No Assurance for GPL, by SFLC
- Patents in Standards, from wikibook "FOSS Open Standards"
- Standards, Patents and the Dynamics of Innovation on the World Wide Web, by w3c's Daniel Weitzner
- A Jesuit's Guide to Open Standards, about patents and standards, by Glyn Moody
- Definition of "royalty-free" for standards, W3C
- Xiph.Org Comments for the Federal Trade Commission Patent Standards Workshop, 14 June 2011, Xiph.org (audio-video software)
Specific standards harmed
- The Widgets Updating standard, of W3C blocked by Apple's patent
- IETF: Please reject the "Transport Layer Security (TLS) Authorization Extensions" proposed standard, by FSF
- Microsoft: "Our software patents preclude interoperability", 2006 press release by FSFE
- The VideoLan media player and other software for working with video formats are threatened by software patents
- Does FFmpeg infringe patents? We don't know
- The jpeg file format was threatened, article by PubPat