all codecs are covered by patents [LWN.net]

all codecs are covered by patents

Posted Feb 16, 2007 1:48 UTC (Fri) by DonDiego (subscriber, #24141)
In reply to: It only sounds like a problem by mattdm
Parent article: Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Designers (internetnews.com)

All (useful) video codecs are covered by patents (yes, even Theora) yet this has never been a hindrance to open source implementations.

(Log in to post comments)

theora and patents

Posted Feb 16, 2007 5:29 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

As I understand it, the patents that cover Theora have been donated with a free license by On2, their owner. If you believe otherwise, please point to some evidence.

theora and patents

Posted Feb 16, 2007 5:47 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

The people that created VP3 donated their patents that they've received so that we can have Theora.

That is not to say that they have donated ALL patents, because they do not own all of them that cover VP3. There is a lot of things that Theora do that mpeg4 codecs do and the mpeg4 folks charge money for.

I don't have proof about this as I don't understand the math behind encoding and such. But If you search through the ffmpeg mailing lists you can find people responding to this question time to time.

My limited understanding is that people on the ffmpeg lists say that Theora is infinging against a number of patents (not owned by On2), but so is everybody else. Also the patents are invalid due to prior art and all that.

I am not a lawyer but it seems safest just to ignore it and assume Theora is safe. But also not to be scared of shipping other codecs support coming out of places like ffmpeg, just as long as your able to quickly respond if there is a problem.