video codec patent nonsense

video codec patent nonsense

I'd hate to flood the threat after already saying so much, so I'll just speak again to make this small point of correction:

The only times when things really got to the courts was CSS decryption. We won fair and square.

More interesting to me is that in the US the only court case related to CSS of which I am aware is Universal City Studios, Inc. et al v. Reimerdes, Corley and Kazan, and not only was there no "we won" in that case, legally it was a total and unmitigated failure. Plaintiffs were demanded to not distribute CSS and not link to anyone distributing it and it was upheld by a US federal appellate court, so the ruling is precedential.

Of course, since CSS was a weak protection scheme which ultimately depended on secrecy for its security, once that particular horse was out of the barn attempting to suppress further redistribution was futile. The same situation simply doesn't exist for encumbered codecs, the licensing of which continues to generate millions in income even though their specifications are publicly available. While someone may well get away with distributing a geek-ware movie player including H.264, or bittorrent distributing bunches of illicitly copied movies in a format with per-use fees, plenty of other people won't. Helping these people is not the primary motivation for free codecs. The medium-sized band or independent movie maker trying to make it big shouldn't have to pay what amounts to a codec tax to distribute their works..., but they do because they aren't judgment-proof and the risk of not playing along is too great. If you don't think Theora or Dirac go far enough I invite you to help out.

Cheers.

I was making a somewhat more general point, sorry for being unclear.  It is always claimed
that multimedia hackers will get in all sorts of legal troubles due to patent infringement,
reverse engineering and whatnot. Contrary to the FUD, this has never been the case.

The only cases that actually went to court were related to CSS.  However, DVD Jon won fair and
square.  I actually forgot about the case you mentioned, but later there was Bunner and
Pavlovich and this one went well:

http://w2.eff.org/IP/Video/DVDCCA_case/

This is not about "getting away with geek-ware".  VLC is the single most successful free
software application next to Firefox.  I see it on every Windows desktop I encounter.  And it
is so much better than any of its proprietary alternatives that only play DVDs or a small
subset of codecs.

The use cases you describe are valid, but they cover perhaps 1% of the people using multimedia
software.  The vast majority are private people that will never get into trouble for using
libdvdcss to watch their DVDs or for encoding their wedding videos in H.264.