The United Nations Organisation ITU and especially the Telecommunications part of that organisation, the ITU-T, do not hold any patent rights; and neither do 3GPP and the same applies to the 3GPP partner organisations: ARIB, ATIS, CCSA, ETSI, TSDSI, TTA, TTC . . .
The ITU-T includes a statement similar to this in their newer standards documents:* INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS
The ITU draws attention to the possibility that the practice or implementation of this Recommendation may involve the use of a claimed Intellectual Property Right.
The ITU takes no position concerning the evidence, validity or applicability of claimed Intellectual Property Rights, whether asserted by ITU members or others outside of the Recommendation development process.
As of the date of approval of this Recommendation, the ITU had/had not received notice of intellectual property, protected by patents, which may be required to implement this Recommendation. However, implementors are cautioned that this may not represent the latest information and are therefore strongly urged to consult the TSB patent database.*
In the case of H.264/MPEG-4, the patent pool is managed by MPEG LA, LLC based in Denver, Colorado (and, they are not affiliated with the MPEG group); members of the patent pool include the Fraunhofer Society (known for their invention of MP3 which is now largely patent-free).Therefore, any patent fees payable should be settled by means of an invoice issued by the MPEG LA, LLC (in the case of Linux on a per user basis). >:)
Given the legal issues around DRM and in particular local and international copyright laws which are currently being changed, modified, updated and messed about by the European Union, the Open Source community may need a similar tactic for lbdvdcss . . . >:)
Please note that the Wikipedia URL needs the full stop following “Ltd”.
Yes, and this is interesting:The case raised some concerns particularly since it involved an individual being prosecuted for activities that were fully legal in the country where they occurred.
Bruce Schneier wrote the following in the May 15, 2001 Crypto-Gram (only a short extract):The Futility of Digital Copy Prevention
*Music, videos, books on the Internet! Freely available to anyone without paying! The entertainment industry sees services like Napster as the death of its business, and it’s using every technical and legal means possible to prevail against them. They want to implement widespread copy prevention of digital files, so that people can view or listen to content on their computer but can’t copy or distribute it.
Abstractly, it is an impossible task. All entertainment media on the Internet (like everything else on the Internet) is just bits: ones and zeros. Bits are inherently copyable, easily and repeatedly. If you have a digital file – text, music, video, or whatever – you can make as many copies of that file as you want, do whatever you want with the copies. This is a natural law of the digital world, and makes copying on the Internet different from copying Rolex watches or Louis Vuitton luggage.
What the entertainment industry is trying to do is to use technology to contradict that natural law. They want a practical way to make copying hard enough to save their existing business. But they are doomed to fail.*
