More than half of the H.264 patents have expired

[kurkosdr]

Originally Posted by benwaggoner

MPEG-LA doesn't provide any tools, standards, etcetera. Once all relevant patents have expired, they'll presumably shut down teh licensing program because there would be nothing to license. But the H.264 ecosystem would keep on trucking, just without patents or licensing to worry about.

One risk is that, as patents expire, the companies with still-active patents each go their own merry way so they can milk as much of their old patents as possible. This could make H.264 more costly to license.

This is why I am interested in seeing how many patents with a priority date before 1st March 2005 remain active after that date (or realistically, after the end of 2025 to account for minor extensions). In the meantime, H.264 is just too ubiquitous to die in the next 2 years.

Originally Posted by FranceBB

Very nice. this is what Dolby did when the AC3 patents expired as they pushed for E-AC3 and now AC4...

Personally, I am not necessarily annoyed by the Dolby formats themselves but the lack of a stereo AAC secondary stream when a Dolby audio format is being broadcast. For example, there was an attempt in France to have the UHD terrestrial channels be AC4-only with no secondary stream whatsoever, and I was like "Are those broadcasters (and the governments that oversee them) completely out of their minds? Or completely in the pocket of Dolby?" AC4 is not supported by many TVs and is mostly unsupported on PCs. Fortunately, all those few broadcasters here in Europe that had gone AC4-only have since realised their mistake and have added E-AC3 secondary streams alongside the AC4, so that's a headache avoided, at least here in Europe (don't know how things are in the US).

About E-AC3, I understand the need for it, since the move to H.265 for FullHD content is making the bitrate inefficiency of AC3 more apparent (especially when accompanied by an AAC secondary stream as it should), but E-AC3 can still be a headache when on its own (though not of AC4 proportions obviously). Speaking of which, do we have a list of E-AC3 patents? Some countries (like France) use E-AC3 exclusively even for H.264 broadcasts, so it's almost on topic.

[oibaf]

E-AC3 patent thread: https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=184389
Here there is a link to another hydrogenaudio forum thread.

[kurkosdr]

Originally Posted by oibaf

E-AC3 patent thread: https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=184389
Here there is a link to another hydrogenaudio forum thread.

Oops, forgot about that.

[kurkosdr]

Originally Posted by oibaf

There is a new February 2024 update.

In the previous November 2023 update there were 17 pages of patents, in the newer one there are still 17 pages with a higher number of patents.

In details, here is the total number of patents:

• 2023-11 list: 2263
• 2024-02 list: 2335

It looks like since the latest update 72 patents expired, and 144 new patents were added.

The good news is that in the next 3 months 556 patents should expire (which is about 24% of remaining active patents).

I am attaching the ordered lists, if you are interested.

Since your attachments are "pending approval", can you post the two lists on some external site like pastebin?

I want to see how many of those 144 new patents are from before 1st March 2005 (at least the application date).

It seems weird some entity would have a patent essential to the High Profile and would not collect royalties on it for 18+ years.

[oibaf]

Originally Posted by kurkosdr

Since your attachments are "pending approval", can you post the two lists on some external site like pastebin?

• 2023-11 active patents list
• 2024-02 active patents list

I want to see how many of those 144 new patents are from before 1st March 2005 (at least the application date).

It seems weird some entity would have a patent essential to the High Profile and would not collect royalties on it for 18+ years.

I suspects they are mostly newer patents for recent H.264 extensions, mostly unused. Anyway, let us know!

[kurkosdr]

Originally Posted by oibaf

• 2023-11 active patents list
• 2024-02 active patents list

I suspects they are mostly newer patents for recent H.264 extensions, mostly unused. Anyway, let us know!

Thanks!

I cleaned up the February 2024 list from the "exp" strings (and removed the expiring patents from the November 2023 list, since they have already expired):
Nov 2023: https://pastebin.com/raw/WaN3xweH
Feb 2024: https://pastebin.com/raw/X0HvJ70b

So, now we can do a:

diff --side-by-side --suppress-common-lines nov2023.txt feb2024.txt

And we get the list of 144 new patents:
https://pastebin.com/raw/iNeDqFwK

But wait, there is more, MPEG LA likes to list the EP patents for every country they apply to, which means that a single EP patent creates 24 entries. Same for the EA and AP patents, which create 8 and 18 entries respectively. So, if we clean up a bit further, we get "only" 51 new patents:
https://pastebin.com/raw/AD5ih8vf
(note: I have added the 5 "international" patents at the top of the text)

This is a low enough number that I can run them all through Google Patents manually, 17 a day will do it (I really want to see how many of them have application dates from before 1 March 2005).

Also, ideally we'd have a way to provide automated submissions to Google Patents (so I can run the full Feb 2024 list through Google Patents to extract application date and expected expiration for each), but I can't guarantee I will attempt something like that.

@oibaf
Also, how do you convert from PDF to text (and remove noise such as page numbers and company names)?

[kurkosdr]

Also, one WTF I have already noticed, the last US patent (numerically) on the list is US 11,871,015 has an application date of 2022-09-21, which is weird because the last version of the AVC/H.264 standard according to Wikipedia and VIA-LA's own website is 2021-08-22. Shouldn't the standard itself count as prior art? At this point, I think they are just adding random non-essential stuff (for example encoding optimization methods) to pad the number of patents in the pool.

[Avclover]

US 11,871,015 is based on the same priority document than the rest of this patent family which predates the standard. Data in Google patents is often flawed or incomplete but it's clearly stated on the cover sheet of the actual patent. Nothing shady afaict.

[oibaf]

Originally Posted by kurkosdr

Also, how do you convert from PDF to text (and remove noise such as page numbers and company names)?

Well... given it looks you are using some unix version it's as simple as typing on the CLI what you already asked :

pdftotext file.pdf

You can also first cut the first pages with active patents (17, for the last 2 reports) using pdfarranger before that.

Then, you can just use some trick like this:

grep [0-9] file.txt | sort | uniq > file-cleaned.txt

and then manually check the resulting file to remove spurious lines (or improve the above command).

To get the unique EP patent from the "multiple European patents" you can do something like:

grep EP file-cleaned.txt | grep -v Exp | cut -d'(' -f2 | cut -d')' -f1 | sort | uniq

Always check the resulting file, because the original PDF file have some typos that may break something.

[oibaf]

Originally Posted by kurkosdr

This is a low enough number that I can run them all through Google Patents manually, 17 a day will do it (I really want to see how many of them have application dates from before 1 March 2005).

Also, ideally we'd have a way to provide automated submissions to Google Patents (so I can run the full Feb 2024 list through Google Patents to extract application date and expected expiration for each), but I can't guarantee I will attempt something like that.

Any news?

[oibaf]

BTW, it looks like there are only two patents still active in EU, expiring in less than 10 months:

• 2025-01-26: EP 1709801 (Panasonic Holdings Corporation)
• 2025-01-26: EP 2384002 (Panasonic Holdings Corporation)

Do someone known if they are really needed for the common used High Profile? (or if they are needed for something else)

[hajj_3]

Originally Posted by oibaf

BTW, it looks like there are only two patents still active in EU,

nokia has some patents too.

[hajj_3]

an updated list of h265 patent pools:

[oibaf]

Originally Posted by oibaf

BTW, it looks like there are only two patents still active in EU,

Originally Posted by hajj_3

nokia has some patents too.

Do you have any references?

[hajj_3]

Originally Posted by oibaf

Do you have any references?

nokia is suing hp and amazon over h264 patents:

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket...s-oy-v-hp-inc/
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket...amazoncom-inc/

[oibaf]

Originally Posted by hajj_3

nokia is suing hp and amazon over h264 patents:

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket...s-oy-v-hp-inc/
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket...amazoncom-inc/

"District Court, D. Delaware"

I cannot see the patents, but it just looks like U.S. related, or is there any other detail related to EU patents?

[hajj_3]

Originally Posted by oibaf

"District Court, D. Delaware"

I cannot see the patents, but it just looks like U.S. related, or is there any other detail related to EU patents?

https://www.nokia.com/blog/nokia-see...ia-inventions/

[kurkosdr]

Originally Posted by oibaf

Any news?

Life got in the way, but anyway, someone has made a much better list.

Originally Posted by hajj_3

nokia has some patents too.

No, they don't, not necessarily.

As I've explained to you on the previous page, Nokia says their patents cover "video compression, content delivery, content recommendation and aspects related to hardware".

We only care about video compression, not the other three, and even then only essential ones. So, unless Nokia comes forward and clarifies which patents relate to video compression and which of those they consider to be essential, they cannot be assumed to have asserted a single patent against H.264.

[Spyros]

After three months, a new patent list is available: May 1, 2024

14 pages with unexpired patents, 45 pages with expired ones (compared to 17 pages with unexpired patents, 41 pages with expired ones in February).
Sorry, I don't have the patience to analyze them methodically, feel free to do so if you want.

The next three months seem uneventful, with only 20 patents expiring in that period.

(Btw, I'll update the first post to show the gradual progress of patents expiring)

[benwaggoner]

Originally Posted by hajj_3

https://www.nokia.com/blog/nokia-see...ia-inventions/

Unified Patents has list of patents in litigation by company: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/pt...echnologies+OY

Which helpfully lists the patents in question with links.