“Patent and legal issues” topped, at least numerically, the community goals developed at the recently-held Foundations of Open Media 2009 workshop, a write-up of which was just posted here.
Also noted in “Patents and the bright future of open media codecs”, the FOMS group has set aside 15% of its budget to support patent analysis.
For those who haven’t seen it, check the interesting article “Patent Status of MPEG-1, H.261 and MPEG-2″ and associated wiki here. Comments on calculating expiration dates can be found in the responses to article here.
Thanks for mentioning my article. This is somewhat off topic, but do you have any idea how I can get a hold of this reference: “S. Searing, “Suggested Formulas for Audio Analysis and Synthesis Windows”, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11 MPEG 91/328, November 1991. I am trying to figure out if there is anything that might be patentable in the synthesis windows for MPEG-1 Audio Layers 1 and 2 and since the MPEG-1 spec basically treats this as a black box, this is tricky.