Vorbis development, status & patent issues, PART 2 - Technical discussion Options

[Gabriel]

Moderator comment
Currently the Vorbis patent issue covers these threads:
Vorbis development, status & patent issues PART 1 - NON-technical discussion
Vorbis development, status & patent issues PART 2 - Technical discussion (This thread)
/Moderator comment

By looking at this:
http://www.xiph.org/archives/vorbis-dev/20...2/index.html#83
it seems that Xiph (at least in 2000) was open to the idea of disclosing the patent research.
Is this position changed now, or does it still stand?

[petracci]

I think we got into one very serous discussion right now,  because this patent is applicable to many other codecs, some of them - not that open

Yes, or I'd rather say that is might be applicable (and probably is).

It would be very interesting for the audio coding society to see what is the real influence of this patent to MDCT window switched codecs - I think the best way would be to call Mr. Edler to participiate as he is the principal inventor of the window-switched filterbank.

I will see Mr. Edler end of november, but I could also send a mail. I know he's rather busy and he might mot have time to answer before november anyway.

If patent proves to be applicable to Vorbis/WMA/...  it will be quite problematic to avoid it in any further "free" codec.   Otherwise, it would be a clear sign that it is possible to write audio coding-decoding system that works in MDCT domain without infringing some of the "unavoidable" patents.

Yes, and it would be very valuable to have a list of these "unavoidable" patents and study their possible loopholes. But I assume thatthey have this list at Vorbis development ?

As for WMA, I have the idea that they do something different than window switching. See patent US6115689.

This post has been edited by petracci: Sep 26 2003, 10:16