Is MPEG-2 patented?

[SaSi]

In the ISO MPEG-2 specification documents, in Annex F of the Video specs, the following statement can be found:

(I have rephrased the statement, as "I am not allowed to use any part or the whole document and copy it "

"The reader is cautioned to the possibility that in order to comply with some parts of the specification it may be required to use an invention covered by patent rights of the following companies:"

The statement is followed by a two page list of companies that have claimed rights on Video, Audio or System stream specs (or parts of). The list includes IT companies, Broadcast corporations and even Universities.

My question is the following:

If a reader reads and understands the specification document (which is a public standard) and is smart enough to create MPEG-2 streams (encode) or parse them and create pictures (decode) without any external help but simply by his or her knowledge in reading, programming and mathematics, is it possible that still patents would apply?

I am not talking about using libraries created by a company (to speed development or make more efficient code). Just read the specs and write appropriate code.

Anybody with background knowledge on this?

[RabidDog]

8) any mpeg-2 encoder has to pay royalties eg tmpgenc hence mpeg1 free but mpeg2 cost.

[The village idiot]

The mpeg2 standard is not really public. If you want the full ISO standard you have to buy it. So yes mpeg2 is protected to a certain degree.

[SaSi]

The mpeg2 standard is not really public. If you want the full ISO standard you have to buy it. So yes mpeg2 is protected to a certain degree.

I will agree to that. I didn't mention it in my posting, but that's the way to get hold of the 13818 documents. But this is true for any ISO document anyway; the price is assosiated with the cost of forming committees, producing standards, maintaining them and being able to provide them to the public.

And it's not royalty, as I understand it. Royalty is a fee you pay to someone for every copy of the software you sell. It used to be the case with some programming languages, like MicroFocus COBOL/2.

Tmpgenc may have to pay royalties because it may be using commercially available encoding libraries for MPEG-2. (Although I can't imagine how someone may have written an MPEG-1 encoder and decided they had to buy commercial libraries for MPEG-2.

Any other guesses - or even better - anybody with some firm feedback?

[housepig]

If a reader reads and understands the specification document (which is a public standard) and is smart enough to create MPEG-2 streams (encode) or parse them and create pictures (decode) without any external help but simply by his or her knowledge in reading, programming and mathematics, is it possible that still patents would apply?

Sasi -

it would depend on how broadly or narrowly the existing patents are written, and if you could develop a way to weave around the existing coverage. If there's a ton of patents in the art, they are probably pretty narrowly written (there's not one giant, squatting patent that covers everything, instead there are a ton of patents covering little aspects).

so if one was going to make a codec (which is what I assume you are talkign about), one should take a look at the actual patents and see how much wiggle room there is for something new to elbow in.

if you need more info or if that makes no sense, let me know and I'll try to clarify.