Apparently, the codec’s vendors have heard nothing of a patent pool being assembled to go after them

May 3, 2010 09:28 GMT  ·  By

The designer and lead developer of the OGG container, as well as the Vorbis audio and Theora video codecs, Gregory Maxwell, has stepped up to say that Steve Jobs needs to get his facts straight, after reading the CEO’s open letter on Flash.

Jobs claimed that a “patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other ‘open source’ codecs now,” to which Maxwell reportedly responded by saying, “[…] The quoted statement is either a forgery, the result of a misunderstanding, or that the statement may be indicative of a dishonest and anti-competitive collusion by Apple and other H.264 patent holders to interfere with the development, promotion, and utilization of unencumbered media standards.”

In his open letter to the Apple community, Jobs added that, “Unfortunately, just because something is open source, it doesn’t mean or guarantee that it doesn’t infringe on others patents. An open standard is different from being royalty free or open source.”

Xiph's Gregory Maxwell believed, “It would seem both surprising and remarkably underhanded, even considering the probable involved parties, to undertake constructing a patent pool for some product without ever consulting the vendor of that product: Surely no good faith effort to construct a valid and usable patent pool for a codec could be undertaken without contacting the developers of the codec.” According to a post at the i’ been to Ubuntu blog, Maxwell said that, “The developers of Theora have received no such contact.”

The developer of the Vorbis audio and Theora video codecs goes to great lengths to outline that there is a widespread misconception regarding media codecs and how they are a patent minefield far exceeding other formats from a patent-infringement standpoint. “Certainly this is the case for the MPEG codecs, but it is not a universal truth,” he claimed, and elaborated on the matter. “To understand why, you must understand a little about the process used to build these international standards.” Visit the blog in question for more information.