Sisvel has announced the creation of a patent pool covering technologies that intersect with the free AV1 and VP9 video encoding formats. Sisvel specializes in intellectual property management, royalty collection, and patent litigation (a patent troll that caused the distribution of OpenMoko builds to be temporarily suspended).
Although the AV1 and VP9 formats are royalty-free, Sisvel is introducing its own licensing program, under which manufacturers of AV1-enabled devices will be required to pay 32 cents for each device with a screen and 11 euro cents for a device without a screen (for VP9, ββthe fee is defined at 24 and 8 euro cents, respectively). They plan to collect royalties from any device that encodes and decodes videos in AV1 and VP9 formats.
At the first stage, the main interest will be associated with the collection of royalties from manufacturers of mobile phones, smart TVs, set-top boxes, multimedia centers and personal computers. In the future, the collection of royalties from the developers of software encoders is not excluded. At the same time, the content itself in AV1 and VP9 formats, services for storing and delivering content, as well as chips and embedded modules used in the content processing process will not be subject to deductions.
Sisvel's patent pool includes patents from JVC Kenwood, NTT, Orange SA, Philips, and Toshiba, which also participate in MPEG-LA's patent pools set up to collect royalties from AVC, DASH, and HEVC implementations. The list of patents included in the AV1 and VP9 related patent pools has not yet been disclosed, but in the future it is promised to be published on the website of the licensing program. It is important to note that the patents are not owned by Sisvel, this firm only administers the patents of third parties.
Recall that to provide free use of AV1, the Open Media Alliance was created, which was joined by companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla, Facebook, Amazon, Intel, AMD, ARM, NVIDIA, Netflix and Hulu, which provided AV1 users with a license to royalty-free use of their patents that overlap with AV1. The terms of the AV1 license agreement also provide for the withdrawal of rights to use AV1 in the event of patent claims against other users of AV1, i.e. companies cannot use AV1 if they are involved in litigation against AV1 users. Against patent trolls such as Sisvel, this method of protection does not work, since such companies do not conduct development and production activities, and it is impossible to file a countersuit against them.
In 2011, a similar situation was observed: MPEG LA tried to form a patent pool to collect royalties for the VP8 codec, which is also positioned as available for free use. At that time, Google was able to negotiate with MPEG LA and acquired the right to publicly and royalty-free use MPEG LA's VP8 patents.
Source: linux.org.ru