2015年9月16日
By 1月时特约编辑
专题文章

开放媒体联盟在编解码器的创造上有风险吗?

黑石IP is an investment bank that advises operating companies on trading intellectual property and technology assets. 的形成开放媒体联盟提出了许多与知识产权和商业相关的问题, 所以我们找来了黑石公司的CEO 埃尔维Causevic (右上)和IP strategy Ed鱼 (右下)来回答问题. 科塞维奇和菲什名下都有多项专利, 作为发明人从事专利和知识产权方面的工作, 授权人专有, 和企业家.

流媒体: What’s your assessment of the patent risk undertaken by the 开放媒体联盟?

黑石IP: 正如联盟在声明中指出的那样, this is about the “next” codec—after HEVC—and presumably not commercially developed for several years. 由于规定如此之少，评估专利风险相当依赖于推测.

也就是说, and given our work at 黑石IP with companies across the media spectrum (hardware, 软件, 流媒体服务, 移动服务提供商, 等.)，我们对这个问题有自己的看法. The essential point is that a lot of inventive work went into core technologies that underlie HEVC, 比如新颖的四叉树结构, 复杂的瓷砖, 硬件优化, 和可扩展性. One would have to assume that at least some of these core innovations would be used or extended in the codec the Alliance is proposing, 因此，与该功能相关的专利将继续适用. 与此同时, 反向兼容性很重要, meaning that then existing patents would likely continue to apply to at least some functionality.

也, 如果以历史为鉴, 联盟之外的许多公司都开始了基础R&D在下一代标准上，因为当前版本正在实现. Most of those other companies have a history of patent filing and patent licensing.

流媒体: 为什么联盟要冒这个险?

黑石IP: 有许多可能的原因与技术战略有关, 商业策略和其他一些因素. And it goes almost without saying that many of these companies have meaningful pre-existing portfolios and cross licenses with a very large set of companies throughout the industry. In practice we’ve found that potential patent risk isn’t the primary driver during the “startup” phase of most technology alliances (and hasn’t historically been the modus operandi of some of the companies participating in the Alliance either).

流媒体: Why hasn’t anyone not party to the MPEG LA/谷歌 agreement sued 谷歌 on VP8/9 (other than Nokia which appears to have lost)?

黑石IP: That’s a good question and it probably turns more on business relationships than it does on patent issues. Nokia became a more assertive technology licensor post its deal with 微软 on handsets, 这可能产生了一些影响, 也. 也, and at least historically, there has not been wider industry adoption of VP8/9. 关于VP9/VP10, 而人们可能会期望比VP8/VP9更广泛的采用, it is not clear that third-party licenses such as were made available for VP8 in previous years would be readily available again now, nor that relevant patents would be available on FRAND terms for proprietary implementations.

流媒体: 我们已经听到了很多关于第三个HEVC专利组织的讨论. 这种可能性有多大，谁会参与其中?

黑石IP: 在这个关键时刻，我们不清楚如何阻碍这一点. We do know that a variety of 授权人专有 voiced dissatisfaction with the MPEG LA licensing scheme for HEVC, and understand that 授权人专有 that are also licensees may have had obvious strong incentives to keep royalties rates very low. Companies that are primarily 授权人专有 and have a large amount of fundamental IP would, 这是可以理解的, 更多地受到IP的ROI的驱动. We also know that a number of parties that were very involved in the HEVC standardization process and are part of the H264 (AVC) pool are not yet “in” a pool. 除了, 硬件和SOC供应商，如博通, 联发科, Qualcomm, 和其他人, 以及更多专注于行业的公司，如VIXS和Magnum, 可能有重要的相关投资组合.

One danger to the media ecosystem we see would be if pools become too fractured or if recent press kept companies “on the sidelines” in favor of bilateral deals rather than pooling. 从相关知识产权丛林的角度来看, the prospect of complexity of large number of bi-lateral deals would almost certainly hinder adoption.

流媒体: Why don’t standards bodies like the ITA and MPEG require those who participate in a standard to agree in advance to join a single pool?

黑石IP: 根据我们的经验，这有很多实际和法律上的原因. 比如，大多数公司都需要灵活性, the ability to execute bi-lateral licenses of their own patents (even while participating in a pool). 这可能是出于专利交叉许可、诉讼和解或其他原因. 也, trying to “tie” someone in too early generally dampens early adoption efforts. 这对小股东或大学来说可能不是什么大问题, 但对于拥有大量资金的公司来说，这是可能的, 高质量的投资组合或重要的产品重点领域. 因为我们不是反垄断律师, we’re leaving to one side whether any anti-trust issues would be raised from that sort of agreement “in advance.“也许你的读者可以对此有所启发.

流媒体: 您如何评估联盟编解码器对HEVC的风险?

黑石IP: HEVC as a technology is well understood and literally dozens of leading companies have spent millions of dollars in developing and standardizing it for current deployment over many years. 这是上一代技术的一个阶跃变化功能, 在我们看来, 而不仅仅是AVC的增量.

而且，正如联盟自己所说，它是关于HEVC之后的编解码器. 如果你看看编解码器的历史(尤其是视频)作为指南, 这种有意义的进步每十年左右就会出现一次. It will be interesting to see what might get produced—as opposed to announced—by the Alliance. 虽然其中一些公司有合作成功的历史, 另一些人则是有些奇怪的同床共枕. When one thinks about the possible motivation for and subtext of the Alliance announcement, 然而, we believe that the most likely outcome in the short- and medium-term will be a dialogue among HEVC Advance and leading IP holders and implementers to arrive at terms that meet the needs of all key parties in each industry segment. Clearer heads nearly always prevail when the technical value proposition is compelling, 就像HEVC一样.