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Comment by brucethemoose2 | Hacker News Reader

> While Nokia's complaint against Amazon concerned streaming video, its complaint against HP involved the company's desktop and laptop computers, which allegedly contained the same proprietary H.264 and H.265 technology.

I have not read Nokia's brief, but that is particularly eyebrow raising.

Is Microsoft shipping h264 as a OEM MS Store app like they do for HEVC these days? Either that, or they must be shipping bloatware with AVC, otherwise it seems the buck would stop with Intel/AMD/Nvidia/Microsoft, not HP.

All this is just another nail in the coffin for VVC though. No one big enough to get sued wants to touch it with a 10 foot pole, and Nokia has justified the paranoia once again.

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I thought that with patents, each entity among the manufacturing chain potentially needs a license? There is no analog for the first sale doctrine, or neither a requirement for consistent enforcement (as is there for trademarks).

> There is no analog for the first sale doctrine...

There is. It is called patent exhaustion. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaustion_doctrine_under_U.S....

There was a fad of issuing a "covenant not to sue" in lieu of a license, specifically to try to avoid triggering exhaustion, but courts seem to be (correctly, in my IANAL opinion) treating them as licenses anyway. See, e.g., https://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2013/01/3rd-circuit-covenan...

But isn't that easily avoided by suitably scoping the license grant?

I would not say "easily"... patent holders will absolutely try to avoid the effects of exhaustion by imposing post-sale or field-of-use restrictions, but lawsuits about it have gone to the Supreme Court, e.g., https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/553/617/ (and not worked out well for the patent holder).

As far as hardware decoding goes, I thought chipmakers paid the fee for everyone down the line?

Otherwise... thats pretty horrific. Would businesses using HP laptops en masse be exposed too?

Certainly not for everyone. Even if you buy professional videoconferencing equipment for business purposes, you do not get a patent license for its commercial use. Those paid offerings typically come with terms similar to the ones Cisco includes in their free Open264 builds:

THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR THE PERSONAL USE OF A CONSUMER OR OTHER USES IN WHICH IT DOES NOT RECEIVE REMUNERATION TO (i) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC STANDARD (“AVC VIDEO”) AND/OR (ii) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL ACTIVITY AND/OR WAS OBTAINED FROM A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO.

https://www.openh264.org/BINARY_LICENSE.txt

I'm not sure if if the relevant patent pools even have incoming licensing coverage for live Internet video because that arrived only after the pools had long been established.

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