On 7/19/05, Monty <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Ehmer's work is cited but we don't actually use Ehmer's data. The > curves you see in the tonemasking are directly from the ears of yours > truly measured repeatedly over the space of a month and pessimistic > mean taken. There's a 4kHz notch there that's actually an unfortunate > artifact of the measuement.
Interesting. AIUI that doesn't necessarily imply that your "golden ears" curve wouldn't be ruled to infringe on a nearly indistinguishable semi-empirical curve if there were such a patent -- but I would think that this aspect of the reference encoder's method would be ruled unpatentably obvious in light of Ehmer. Which, from a point of view in which you prefer unpatentable techniques (not least to reduce the risk of being submarined), is a good thing. > The irony here is that tone-tone masking is the least useful of the > techniques Vorbis uses for psychoacoustic measurement. Higher-speed > vorbis encoders, such as Mercora's, dispense with tone-tone masking > entirely. That's mighty cool. Can you say anything about the Mercora encoder's psycho-acoustic bits, or about how you approach the risk that loading a particular codebook into the Vorbis decoder would result in something patent-infringing? Have you tried, just for kicks, mapping the AC-3 and/or MP3 techniques onto the Vorbis framework? It would be kind of fun to write a lossless transcoder to Vorbis from one or more patent-encumbered formats and to see if there are any discernible patterns in the codebooks. It might also be a prudent defensive measure so that you can demonstrate what a potentially infringing Vorbis stream would look like and evaluate to what extent you can distinguish them from Mercora streams. Could be doubly prudent if there's anything about the Mercora internals that you wouldn't want to have to divulge into the public record during a court proceeding, since presumably in the absence of a patent you have no way of retaining proprietary rights to that encoder's methods of operation other than trade secret law. Note that I have no problem with the Mercora encoder not being open source, and I'm not trying to use this as some sort of object lesson in the legitimacy of "software patents" -- though I could see it shaping up that way in the long run. I'm just trying to understand how deliberately eschewing patents works out in a field littered with them. > Was this declarative relief preemptory or the result of litigation. > If it's preemtive... how the H*** did they manage to do that? I am going on the press release at http://investor.dolby.com/ReleaseDetail.cfm?ReleaseID=161066 ; I haven't yet gone to the law library for the April 22, 2005 ruling in the Northern District of California that granted summary judgment of non-infringement, and I don't even know which judge issued it. I don't know for certain how Lucent's patents wound up in play; here is Dolby's spin on it: <quote> In May 2001, Dolby filed a lawsuit against Lucent in the United States District Court seeking a declaration that the '457 and '938 patents are invalid and that Dolby has not infringed, induced others to infringe, or contributed to the infringement of any of the claims of these patents. In August 2002, Lucent filed counterclaims alleging that Dolby has infringed the two patents at issue directly and by inducing or contributing to the infringement of those patents by others. Lucent contended that products manufactured by Dolby licensees incorporating Dolby(R) AC-3 technology infringe those patents. Lucent sought injunctive relief and unspecified damages. </quote> Cheers, - Michael
