Somehow I missed a big nuacence that is being proposed by Nokia (!) to W3C consortium – probably the purest anti-proprietary standards body on the planet.
“The World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, a group devoted to publishing web standards, recently moved to approve the Ogg video and audio formats for inclusion into the forthcoming HTML5 standard. Nokia, maker of mobile phones and mobile multimedia services, has taken exception to this proposal, writing a position paper (PDF) and raising a formal issue at the W3’s web site, claiming that Ogg support should be “deleted†from the spec in order to “avoid any patent issues.â€â€œNokia to W3C: Ogg is proprietary, we need DRM on the Web†– Ogg is an open encoding scheme, as we all know, and it was On2, the company that developed it, gave it and a free, perpetual unlimited license to its patents to the nonprofit Xiph foundation … but somehow Nokia called it “proprietary†and argued for the inclusion of standards that can be used in conjunction with DRM …..
BTW, did you notice that Nokia’s Internet Tablets do not come with Ogg support out of box, official line being that it is up to third party developers to implement it!!!
As one forum user puts it:
“Nokia today is not Nokia from a few years ago. The old Nokia was a company that sold you mobile devices. The problem was, some moron sat inside Nokia and lusted after Apple’s business model… which leads us to the new Nokia. The new Nokia is a company that wants to sell you a mobile device that you’ll use to purchase lots of music and other forthcoming content (N-Gage games) and lock you into their portals and services (navigation subscriptions). The device is only a means to an end, and giving customers choices by making the devices open limits Nokia’s future revenueâ€
Sad to read such news. Looks like Nokia has growth issues and problems with a management – while right hand goes to the open world, left hand trashes all efforts to the hell.What the hell there should be DRM in my device? How far this DRM idiocy can go? When pirated content is better than original one, that’s a real shame for authors. This shows how far abuse of monopoly power can go in modern world.
I agree with the post from BoingBoing, discussing this matter, and closing their thoughts with: “But remember, that’s not what Nokia is objecting to: they are arguing that Ogg is proprietary (it isn’t) and that DRM should be part of a Web standard (it shouldn’t)â€
- PDF link to Nokia’s W3C submission
- Xiph.Org Statement Regarding the HTML5 Draft and the Ogg Codec Set
P.S. It is strange that this post comes right after a post talking about great OS2008 (which indeed is a great Maemo product) release for Nokia Internet Tablets …. hmm