Vectis IP Announces Patent Call for Opus Codec
It was recently revealed through a blog post that the intellectual property management company Vectis IP has announced the start of a pool of patents to license technologies used in the audio codec Opus.
It is mentioned that next patent suite license will cover Opus interactive audio and voice codec, as defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force. Initial participants in the potential Vectis IP group include Fraunhofer and Dolby.
about opus
For those who are unaware of this codec, they should know that 10 years ago, Opus was standardized (RFC 6716) by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) as a royalty-free audio codec for Internet applications and does not interfere with proprietary technologies.
About the case, Vectis IP intends to change license status patent on this codec and has started accepting applications from companies that own patents that overlap with Opus technologies.
“We are pleased to act as trustees in the development of this important patent pool that aims to support efficient, fair and transparent access to hundreds of patents covering technologies used in the Opus codec,” said Giustino de Sanctis, CEO of Vectis. IP. "The reasonable royalty rates from this pool will balance the interests of both the program's innovators and end-user device manufacturers whose products benefit from the use of these proprietary technologies."
After the formation of the patent pool, royalty collection is expected to focus on manufacturers of Opus-compatible hardware devices.
It is worth mentioning that licensing will not affect open codec implementations, applications, services and content distribution.
The first patent holders to join the initiative were Fraunhofer and Dolby. A pool of over a hundred patents is expected to form in the coming months and manufacturers will be required to license the use of the Opus codec in their devices. The amount of the deductions will be 15-12 euro cents for each device.
It should be noted that, in addition to the Opus format, Vectis IP is simultaneously working on the formation of patent pools covering other technologies related to image and video encoding, communications, electronic commerce, and computer networks.
The Opus codec is created by combining the best technologies from Xiph.org's CELT codec and Skype's open source SILK codec. In addition to Skype and Xiph.Org, companies such as Mozilla, Octasic, Broadcom, and Google also participated in the development of Opus.
Opus features high encoding quality and minimal latency for both high-bitrate streaming audio compression and voice compression for bandwidth-constrained VoIP telephony applications.
Previously, Opus was recognized as the best codec when it used a bit rate of 64 Kbit (Opus outperformed competitors like Apple HE-AAC, Nero HE-AAC, Vorbis, and AAC LC.) Reference implementations of the Opus encoder and decoder are released under the BSD license.
All patents used in Opus are granted by the contributing companies for unlimited use without payment of royalties; patents are automatically granted for applications and products that use Opus, without the need for additional approval.
There are no restrictions on the scope and creation of alternative third-party implementations. However, all rights granted are revoked in the event of patent proceedings involving Opus technologies against any Opus user. Vectis IP's activity is directed at finding patents that overlap with Opus, but do not belong to the companies that were originally involved in its development, standardization and promotion.
Finally about the case, I can mention that this movement is very familiar to me to what I do at the time QT, but it remains to be seen how this planned change will develop in the future, since many see this movement as something desperate to rescue the codec .
Source: https://www.vectis.com