Sisvel has announced the creation of a patent pool covering technologies intersecting with the open video coding formats AV1 and VP9. Sisvel specializes in intellectual property management, royalty collection, and filing patent lawsuits (patent troll, due to which the distribution of OpenMoko builds had to be temporarily suspended).
Although AV1 and VP9 formats do not require patent royalties, Sisvel is introducing its own licensing program, under which device manufacturers supporting AV1 will have to pay €0.32 per screen device and €0.11 per non-screen device (for VP9, the royalties are set at €0.24 and €0.08, respectively). Royalties are planned to be collected from any devices encoding and decoding video in AV1 and VP9 formats.
Initially, the main interest will be in collecting royalties from manufacturers of mobile phones, smart TVs, set-top boxes, multimedia centers, and personal computers. In the future, royalties from developers of software encoders may also be collected. However, content in AV1 and VP9 formats, services for storing and delivering content, as well as chips and embedded modules used in the content processing will not be subject to royalties.
The Sisvel patent pool includes patents from companies JVC Kenwood, NTT, Orange S.A., Philips, and Toshiba, which also participate in the MPEG-LA patent pools created to collect royalties from implementations of AVC, DASH, and HEVC formats. The list of patents included in the patent pools related to AV1 and VP9 has not yet been disclosed, but it is promised that it will be published on the licensing program's website in the future. It is important to note that the patents do not belong to Sisvel; the company only manages patents of third parties.
It is worth noting that to enable the royalty-free use of AV1, the Open Media Alliance was established, which includes companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla, Facebook, Amazon, Intel, AMD, ARM, NVIDIA, Netflix, and Hulu. These companies provided users with a license for the royalty-free use of their patents that intersect with AV1. The terms of the AV1 license agreement also specify that rights to use AV1 can be revoked in the event of patent litigation against other AV1 users, meaning companies cannot use AV1 if they are involved in legal disputes against AV1 users. This protection method does not apply against patent trolls like Sisvel, as such companies do not engage in development or manufacturing activities, making it impossible to file a counterclaim against them.
In 2011, a similar situation was observed: the MPEG LA company attempted to form a patent pool to collect royalties for the VP8 codec, which is also positioned as available for royalty-free use. At that time, Google was able to reach an agreement with MPEG LA and acquired the rights to the public and royalty-free use of patents owned by MPEG LA that affected VP8.
Source: linux.org.ru
