Xbox Ban In the US?

[Neon Ignition]

In an ongoing lawsuit case with Motorola over copyright infringement for some of the 360's video tech, a ban in Germany has already been granted however it was placed on hold until the outcome of the case in the US was known. It's been ongoing for some time now but hasn't caused waves as such cases usually die off without incident to the consumer. Such a ban in the US however would be massive to Microsoft as the US market is by far the most lucrative for the system and has been instrumental in securing the console a solid place this generation.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-05-23-judge-recommends-us-xbox-360-ban

Interestingly, the judge of the case has recommended that the ban on the sale of the Xbox 360 goes ahead. Such a ban would leave only the Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii available to the buying US public. The judge has said that he wants Microsoft to pay a 7% bond for unsold systems. Microsoft wants this reducing to 2.5% but Motorola wants 100%. The case will now be reviewed by ITC and if it agrees the President, Barack Obama has 60 days to review it. After that the Court of Appeals has a look in.

There's plenty stages to go but this has some traction.

[charlesr]

What has the President got to do with anything? Surely that's just like the Queen having veto over Bills in Parliament - i.e. it has never happened, well at least not since King Charles got beheaded for trying

This whole thing is making both MS and Motorola look bad tbh.

Can anyone sum up which patents have been breached and what they are used for the on Xbox?

[Neon Ignition]

True, I'd have thought that if it gets that far it's likely to be actioned. Kevin Butler will be rubbing his hands

[MartyG]

It's to do with H.264 compression. It affects Windows 7 too.

[charlesr]

If so, couldn't this all just go away with a quick update to use x264 instead?

[originalbadboy]

If so, couldn't this all just go away with a quick update to use x264 instead?

x264 and h264 are the same thing ... H264 is the codec and x264 is the file format, which uses H264.

I cant see this coming to anything , and in all honesty for the judge to be saying there should be a ban then he must be getting paid a wad of cash from someone for the even suggesting it.

ALL these patent rows are getting bloody stupid now, peeps just need to get on with it, and the patent office needs to stop letting people patent things are 'unpatentable'

[charlesr]

x264 is opensource. What does Motorola's patent cover on the xbox (and windows)? I still don't understand why this is an issue.

[EvilBoris]

There are several patents covering aspects of the h264 codec (which both Apple and Microsoft also have patents as part of it)

Motorola also hold patents that cover aspects of WIFI technology, for each wifi device made using these patents, manufacturers pay a fee.

Microsoft have sued Motorola because they want $10 per device as licensing, but Via who owns other patents pertaining to WIFI charge only $1 per device.

It's a ridiculous situation that patents are actually prohibiting innovovation.
Motorola have been suing Google for similar things to do with Android, even after Google aquired Motorola. Wtf

[charlesr]

But as far as I can tell, there are opensource versions of h264 that do all the same stuff - is that incorrect?? If correct, why does anyone use patented versions? Nuts.

[originalbadboy]

x264 is opensource. What does Motorola's patent cover on the xbox (and windows)? I still don't understand why this is an issue.

The point is that x264 is the encoding software, rather than the encoder itself ... That part may well be open source, but the actual decoder is H264, thats what Motorola own... x264 depends on h264

[sj33]

x264 is a royality-free encoder that encodes into the H.264/MPEG4 AVC spec, but commercial use of H.264 material is still bound to the licencing terms of H.264/MPEG4 AVC. x264 removes the entry cost of investing in an encoder (the commercial cost for businesses being non-trivial), allows the source to be open and freely modifiable, and can (theorietically) be modified to add extras that don't adhere to the spec (which is why DivX and Xvid aren't always interchangable if you use special encoding settings).

Of course, there are plenty of truely royalty-free video formats out there, such as WebM, Vorbis etc. YouTube is slowly moving over to WebM as part of it's switchover to HTML5 to avoid being tangled up in the licencing web.

[Sketcz]

Silly question:
Does this affect Canada? As in, will VG+ still sell US 360 consoles should the ban come down in the US?

Otherwise patents and copyright are bull****. Are companies still trying to patent parts of the human genome?

[charlesr]

Hello what? Patent bits of us?

Anyway, thanks for clearing that up - so it's the ability to play this stuff back that's the issue?
So they could just disable it in dash via an update and use an alternative like VP8?

[EvilBoris]

The not just the codec sides of things that Motorola is bugging MS about for the 360, it's part of the 802.11 Specification too, which enables wifi devices or in the case of the 360, let's the pads work.

They can't just disable our pads via a system update. Well they could, but they won't.

[sj33]

It's just a patent battle, it'll be settled out of court.