Subject: GSM 6.10 is public domain; audio/wav needs registered

From: "James P. Salsman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2000 12:03:04 -0800 (PST)

Contrary to what people at VPIM meetings, lists, and on web pages 
have suggested, nobody owns any IPR on the GSM 06.10 vocodec format, 
or on any routines for encoding or decoding it.  It was developed 
from published code by people who took care to publish it before it 
could be monopolized.

Philips owns the rights to a related but different form of LPC, 
from U.S. patent 5,943,646, which was applied for more than four 
years after the publication of GSM 06.10 by ETSI.  That patent is 
most likely what is confusing people about the status.

Also,  http://www.ema.org/vpimdir/specs/draft-ema-vpim-wav-00.txt
-- the pending-in-limbo audio/wav IANA registration -- has an error:  
it reads "audio/vnd.wav"; that should be "audio/vnd.wave", which,  
by the way, hasn't been registered with IANA either.  I agree with 
Keith Moore that they should be registered as identical, and I hope
that they be registered in the same document to make that clearer.
The definitive reference for these formats seems to be kept in 
Microsoft's Support Knowledge Base Article ID Q120253:
  http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q120/2/53.asp

Cheers,
James

---

From: Jutta Degener <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 10:28:34 -0800

> most likely what is confusing people about the status.

The patent I've seen investigated in connection with GSM 06.10
and Philips is the older 4,932,061 (1990), not 5,943,646.
4,932,061 does precede publication of GSM by two years.

Jutta Degener
<[email-masked]>

---

From: "James P. Salsman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 15:52:47 -0800 (PST)

Jutta,

Thanks for the information:

> and Philips is the older 4,932,061 (1990)....

Interesting.  The priority date of that one is 22 March 1985.
The practice of quantizing residual exitation in LPC vocoders was 
not novel in 1985.  For an example of how people were performing 
VQ classification on the exitation residual much earlier, see:

"Epoch extraction from linear prediction residual for 
identification of closed glottis interval", by T. Ananthapadmanabha 
and B. Yegnanarayana,  in IEEE Transactions on Acoustics, Speech, 
and Signal Processing, vol. 27, no.4, pp. 309-19 (1979). 

Certainly the methods of doing such quantization described in the 
claims of patent 4,932,061 are novel, because they all explicitly 
refer to "perceptually weighting" the exitation residual.  However, 
GSM 6.10 uses only four quantization vectors and a linear scaling 
factor, without any weighting based on non-linear perceptual 
modeling, so that particular set of claims do not apply to GSM 6.10.

It also might be helpful to look at the references in the these 
GSM 6.10 descriptions published prior to ETSI's:

"Evolution of Six Medium Bit rate Coders For The Pan-European
Digital Mobile Radio System", by E. Natvig, in Journal On Selected
Areas In Communications, vol. 6, no. 2, pp 324-34 (1988).

"Speech Codec for the European Mobile Radio System", by K. Hellwig, 
P. Vary, D. Massaloux, and J.P. Petit, in Proceedings of the 
ICASSP-88, pp. 227 (April, 1988).

Cheers,
James

---

From: "Eric Burger" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 01:03:02 +0100

The question is not if there is any prior art.  The question is if any of
the primary claims in the Philips patent cover any aspect of GSM.  If not,
it doesn't matter.  If so...

U.S. law is peculiar when it comes to patents.  You are deemed to be
infringing UNLESS you can prove otherwise TO A COURT.  In addition, the
patent is deemed to be valid UNLESS you can prove otherwise TO A COURT.  The
prior art will help your case, but it won't avoid the lawsuit, if the patent
holder thinks they have a case.

The question is whether Philips thinks they have property rights to GSM.
Can't anyone with a big legal staff give them a call?  (C'mon Microsoft,
Lucent, Nortel... we know you know and we know they know you know, so it
won't be such a big deal to have your lawyers call Philips' lawyers...)

--
- Eric
[7 patents pending; 3 more in the works]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked]
> [mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf Of James P. Salsman
> Sent: Thursday, November 16, 2000 12:53 AM
> To: [email-masked]
> Cc: [email-masked]; [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: [VPIM] GSM 6.10 is public domain; audio/wav needs
> registered
>
>
> Jutta,
>