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.

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
• ISO 9660 Rock Ridge Interchange Protocol - afflicted by the Microsoft FAT patents
• mp3
• GSM
• G.729, G.722, and G.723.1

Shoot, so that's that one spupsoes.

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