Stories about: Philips Electronics

Open Invention Network, which buys patents related to the Linux operating system and licenses them royalty-free, Tuesday launched a program aimed at encouraging open-source developers to document information about their work so that it can be easily read and used by patent offices and lawyers.

With ISO's Sept. 2 voting deadline looming, the recently retired secretary general of Ecma International defended Microsoft's Office Open XML document format against fierce technical criticism.

A group of high-profile vendors recently got together to help the Linux community avoid the dicey issue of software patent infringement. Call it a patent payoff system.

Five of the biggest names in technology have funded a new venture called the Open Invention Network that will acquire patents and offer them royalty free to promote the Linux open-source operating system.

Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) will take the next crucial step in a four-year-long battle over software patents within the European Union (E.U.) on Wednesday, when they hold a decisive vote on a proposed E.U. law, or directive, on computer-implemented inventions (CII). The proposal has been dubbed the "software patent directive" by its opponents.

The European Commission has no plans to withdraw a controversial proposal on the patents for computer-implemented inventions, Commissioner for the Information Society Viviane Reding said Wednesday.

The ongoing march towards high-definition video discs saw several new prototype players revealed last week at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

The DVD Forum has approved the physical disc specifications for the rewritable version of HD-DVDs (High Definition/High Density-DVDs), taking the format an important step nearer to mass production.

Manufacturers in search of middleware to connect devices from different vendors and swap digital audio and visual content seamlessly may want to test technology developed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communications Systems.

The Blu-ray Disc Association has added the MPEG4 and VC1 video codecs to its specification for prerecorded Blu-ray Disc media, it said Wednesday. Blu-ray Disc is one of two formats vying to become the de facto optical disc standard for high-definition video.

The group of companies behind the DVD format has approved a next-generation rewritable optical disc that is the same size as existing DVDs but can hold more than four times the amount of data.