I too would like to know the status of the opus IP holders. From what
I've seen on the CELT and opus lists, it seems that the CELT part of
opus is covered by patents from Xiph and Broadcom, and the SILK part of
opus is covered by the rest. All of the IP holders except Qualcomm and
Huawei have released their patents to the public as far as opus is
concerned, and the general consensus from the developers is that
Qualcomm automatically discloses patent claims against codecs whether
they apply or not, and that opus does not infringe on the Qualcomm patents.
The big unknown for me is Huawei. I have not heard anything from anyone
on whether opus infringes on the Huawei patent or not. On the IETF list,
discussing IP issues was discouraged, but I hope now that the Xiph list
is active again the developers can give us some insight on that.
John Ridges
On 7/31/2012 12:21 PM, celt-dev-request at xiph.org
wrote:> Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2012 13:43:15 +1000
> From: Rob Slaviero<robert.slaviero at analog.com>
> Subject: [CELT-dev] CELT license
> To:<celt-dev at xiph.org>
> Message-ID:<00a601cd4dcd$ab92ee20$02b8ca60$@slaviero at analog.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> Hi Xiph,
>
>
>
> We are porting the CELT audio codec onto our Blackfin DSP for subsequent
> software distribution to our customers and would like to ensure we have
> covered the licensing appropriately. In reviewing the Opus codec info, it
> looks like there are multiple contributors (Xiph, Qualcomm, Broadcom,
Skype,
> Microsoft, Huawei), however Xiph seems to be the main (and possibly only)
IP
> holder in CELT. Could you please confirm if there are other parties that
> have a licensing or IP interest in CELT. If it is just Xiph, then I
believe
> that as long as we leave the following notice (that came with version 0.9.8
> of software we used) associated with our port of CELT, we should be fine -
> please confirm.
>