[Discussioni] segnalazione articolo: BBC apre all'OSS

[Giacomo Cosenza]

On Jul 15, 2005, at 9:31 AM, Piero Trono wrote:

>
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/opensource/

una delle cose piu' interessanti e la FAQ di Dirac di cui riporto uno  
stralcio relativo ai brevetti che mi sembra interessante sotto piu'  
punti di vista.

mimmo


Do the BBC have patents in Dirac?

Yes. We have patent applications in train for some of the techniques  
involved in Dirac, and others that we intend to put into Dirac in the  
future. There has been some FUD about this, so we'll be clear: this  
does not affect the Open Source status of Dirac, nor does it affect  
its royalty-free status. The conditions of the MPL mean that we're  
licensing these patents for use within the Dirac software for free.

Do you infringe any patents?

The short answer is that we don't know for certain, but we don't  
think so. We haven't employed armies of lawyers to trawl through the  
tens of thousands of video compression techniques. That's not the way  
to invent a successful algorithm. Instead we've tried to use  
techniques of long standing in novel ways. Where we think we're  
novel, we're in the process of getting patent protection ourselves,  
which will invalidate others' claims of priority. There are some  
areas that are more heavily patented than others. Arithmetic coding  
is one such, even though the technique itself has been around for 25  
years. We're keeping an eye on the situation, and we'll adopt  
alternative techniques if we have to.

What will you do if you infringe any patents?

Code round them, first and foremost. There are many alternative  
techniques to each of the technologies used within Dirac. Dirac is  
relatively modular (which is one reason why it's a conventional  
hybrid codec rather than, say, 3D wavelets) so removing or adding  
tools should be possible until it goes Beta and the bitstream and  
decoder functionality are fixed. But we also need to see where in the  
world potentially problematic patents apply, and how important they are.


Giacomo Cosenza - Sinapsi SpA
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