I haven't dug into the case or the ruling, but this looks like an incorrect court decision and probably an extortion racket. The problem is that, in the supply chain that ends in a completed PC, the system integrator (Acer/Asus) is not the place where video codecs come into the picture. There may be patent-infringing H265 decoding hardware inside the GPU, but Acer and Asus would have purchased GPUs as a standard component. There may be infringing H265 decoding software in the operating system, but again, they would have purchased that as a standard component.

And, realistically, I don't think anyone actually wants patent-encumbered video codecs; we're just stuck with them because bad patent law has allowed companies to have a monopoly over math, hurting the quality of unencumbered codecs, and because the patented codecs have wormed their way into standards so that they're required for interoperability.

As I understand it, this is a pretty common legal problem where many companies worked together to make something. And the result is legally problematic in some way. Its often incredibly difficult for the plaintiff to figure out who's really legally responsible - especially since they don't have access to all the supplier contracts that were signed. And all the suppliers will probably blame each other in court.

Looking at this case, if we assume there is infringing software / hardware inside these laptops, then figuring out which supplier is to blame is Acer/asus's problem. Its not up to nokia to go through all the contracts.

Philosophically, I completely agree with you. I don't even mind these legal battles because they push companies toward the patent-free AV1 codec.

So a near-Non Practicing Entity is enforcing standards-essential software patents in a European court, under arguably unfair, unreasonable, and discriminatory terms.

That's a lot of things the European Patent system is supposed to prevent, and exposes quite a number of loopholes.

> Munich court

This court is famous for being a racket. Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30135264

Munich court is terrible. A disgrace to democracy. They also allow terrorizing of citizens for "copyright infringement" through siding with Movie industry. All ISPs just hand over your personal data to these copyright trolls no questions asked. They literally surveil everyone's Internet unchecked to extort people for money

Hopefully at some point we can agree that communication standards should not be patentable. (And this includes file systems and font typefaces).

Truly the worst codec, legally speaking. Cannot believe we're still fighting these things. I've never seen anybody have any such issues with H.264, AV1, VP9, or any of the older ones. Just like HDMI woes it's a shame that the heavily regulated standards won out over more open or fully open.

Lucent v. Microsoft, $1.53 billion over MP3