Mesa Developers Still Fear Patent Wrath With S2TC

[del_diablo]

There is absolutely no way that any reasonable court would hold
holder of some rights responsible for not educating some senseless
troll and explaining their legal position. That's just a load of bull.

Actually, they would. If it is not a straight case.
For instance: Murder is harshly punishable, but manslaugther is a different law.
And asking for a clarification is perfectly legal.
Denying a clarification should be illegal, but it is not because it would enable troll letters.

On the other hand:
If you are so mighty and wise, why is not the ST2C-stuff implented as a ad-hoc solution yet? Since everything is public, surely there can be no legal grey area?

[frantaylor]

Mesa already allows you to pass ST3C textures to hardware just by setting an environment variable

1. How does this apply to software rendering? That's a feature of mesa.

2. If my software allows use of ST3C textures and I did not purchase a license for this SOFTWARE patent, are you SURE that I am not infringing?

Are you willing to bet your company in court on your fine interpretation of the law?

[frantaylor]

The law is public. The patent is also public. You do know how to read.
Owner of patent claim does not have to explain you shit...

Estoppel: The defense of estoppel occurs when (1) the patent owner, through conduct, positive statement, or misleading silence, represents to the infringer that his business will be unmolested by claims of infringement, and (2) the infringer, in relying on this representation, continues or expands his business.

Estoppel is closely related to latches. In practice, estoppel additionally requires proof by the infringer that he was misled by patent owner conduct. Generally, silence without bad faith will not create an estoppel. However, where a patent owner openly asserts his rights and then chooses to sleep on them, thereby deceiving the infringer, the patent owner will be stopped from reasserting his patent rights in a tardy action.

[crispy]

Actually there might be some room in the legal system for this kind of thinking. It has happened before that a company or individual has lost their rights to a patent or trademark due to not enforcing it. To put it in layman's qualitative terms, basically, if someone abuses the heck out of your patent; you know about their abuse; but you don't do anything about it; then you can lose the rights to your patent because the system assumes that you are implicitly condoning the unlicensed patent use.

This is how I understand the system to be. In fact, this is, in part, why trademarks etc. are enforced so vigorously in the US. If you don't defend your trademark from obvious infringements, its is not possible to enforce any longer. It actually explains why so silly trademarks as 'Windows' and 'Apple' are being (attempted to be) uphold all the time.

Alas this might not hold true for patents..

[hal2k1]

Could some one explain the details: I can't see why a driver for a licensed hardware implementation would infringe any patent?

Especially considering the implied license that consumers get when they purchase hardware.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_license

"Implied licenses often arise where the licensee has purchased a physical embodiment of some intellectual property belonging to the licensor, or has paid for its creation, but has not obtained permission to use the intellectual property."

If you have legally purchased the hardware, then you have the rights to use whatever is in the hardware, even without holding a specific license.

[crispy]

I think there is an old Phoronix article at least mentioning it, but I haven't got the strength to google it...

Must.... push... type... last.. wil.....

[PsynoKhi0]

Technically, it is a bit strange that S3 got the patent from the beginning since it is (according to Wikipedia) "an adaptation of Block Truncation Coding published in the late 1970s." But I guess an adaption (or small change) is always patentable, as long as you can prove that it is doing stuff differently.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Texture_Compression

Well, it's software patents we're talking about here anyway...

[PsynoKhi0]

Estoppel: The defense of estoppel occurs when (1) the patent owner, through conduct, positive statement, or misleading silence, represents to the infringer that his business will be unmolested by claims of infringement, and (2) the infringer, in relying on this representation, continues or expands his business.

Estoppel is closely related to latches. In practice, estoppel additionally requires proof by the infringer that he was misled by patent owner conduct. Generally, silence without bad faith will not create an estoppel. However, where a patent owner openly asserts his rights and then chooses to sleep on them, thereby deceiving the infringer, the patent owner will be stopped from reasserting his patent rights in a tardy action.

Going slightly off-topic here, but could that kind of argument be made for Mono should problems materialize around it?
Because tardiness is kinda subjective even in the law text if my memory serves me well.

[smitty3268]

1. How does this apply to software rendering? That's a feature of mesa.

The software drivers simply don't implement that hack, so they cannot use S3TC. It's the hardware drivers only that watch for the environment variable, and if they find it they advertise the S3TC OpenGL extension. In turn, that means that textures that are pre-compressed in S3TC format (the vast majority of it's use) get passed on to the hardware as a natively supported format. From there the hardware takes care of business without any interference from the driver. If the driver ever does have to mess with the texture on the CPU (as a software renderer would, or if the game is requesting the driver to do the compressing) then it simply crashes.

This behavior is good enough for 99% of games, but because it can't handle 100% of the spec the extension is not enabled by default.

And now Jose is saying that even that much probably breaks patents, so maybe it wouldn't be allowed even if it did implement the whole spec.

The idea behind the S2TC work was to enable that additional software only side without breaking any patents, and apparently Jose was OK with that side of things. It's the existing hardware support that then gets enabled automatically he seemed to have a problem with.

2. If my software allows use of ST3C textures and I did not purchase a license for this SOFTWARE patent, are you SURE that I am not infringing?

Are you willing to bet your company in court on your fine interpretation of the law?

It's not clear to me what you're asking here. By software, do you mean driver? Or software using OpenGL? Anyway, I do not own a company and if I did I would likely use a lawyer to determine my moves.

[dfx.]

I couldn't let this statements go unchallenged..

The option in question is disabled by default, and I don't agree this is inducing in infringement in any way as we always highlighted the S3TC pitfalls in the mailing lists, and the IHV's S3TC licensing terms have not been disclosed, but I agree that at the very least we should better document this option in docs/patents.txt, to avoid misunderstandings as you're having, and yes, probably also have the option disabled by default with a configure option, as we do with floating point textures, which the drivers may override or not, as the breadth of S3TC license of the target hardware is known.

Thanks for pointing this issue out, Rudolf. Thanks for playing devil's advocate in a public forum, and forcing us to take a stricter stand on this matter. I am confused though, because I thought you were trying to help the Linux community, not the patent trolls.

Jose

©http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...st/010317.html

Jose Fonseca is such FUD-mongering hypocritical motherfucker !
not only while pointing on need of "clarification" he twists like a snake and can't say what the fuck he, or anyone in mesa or freedesktop.org for that matter, done to clarify that shit, he also goes as far and blaming everyone who tries to get that said "clarification".
and how vigorously he shuts down and bath in shit every attempt to discuss or solve compressed textures problem with "potential legal problems" argument like he some kind of a secret pencil-neck law enforcer from patent court. and never he says anything fucking substantial about what exactly the problem is (why the fuck users or distributions will be liable in anything since IHV don't even explain their licensing agreements with S3 and there is NOTHING from S3 about this potential issue other than ancient statement that licensing for D3D and OGL done separately ?), how it works (what are fucking exact licensing terms for OGL and hardware implementations ?), what exact liabilities are possible and how the fuck OSS could fight them.