The FSF's open letter to Google

Posted Feb 24, 2010 17:15 UTC (Wed) by lgerbarg (subscriber, #57988) [Link]

If you are going to play the FUD card, you should at least fact check what you say. You are correct, Apple is a member of the MPEG-LA, and is part of the H.264 patent pool. If you want to see who holds publicly disclosed patents on H.264, you can download the list (PDF). There are over 1000 patents on the codecs by ~30 companies. Apple holds 1 patent on H.264, Microsoft hold 65, Fraunhofer hold 72, Toshiba holds 137, LG holds 198, and Panasonic holds 377 patents. Apple almost certainly does not derive any meaningful revenue from the H.264 patent pool.

I take Apple at their word on the patent issue. Think about it, there are 1000 patents by 30 companies on H.264, and there is still the risk of some submarine patent existing. Clearly Apple is exposed to that risk, but they are going to have to expose themselves to something if they want to play video, best to put themselves in the in the same boat as everyone else, and minimize the risk by not committing to anything besides what they need for their products. Even if the total risk on Theora is less than total risk on H.264, they are already committed to H.264, so Theora is just additional risk to them, and until there is market desire whose value outweighs the cost of that risk it just isn't worth it.

On2 may have claimed their codecs don't infringe on other people's patents, they may even think it, but they can't guarantee it. As an example, MS thought it owned the patents to VC-1, but when it pushed it through the standardization process for SMPTE which required the various other major video companies to disclose patents it turned out that 14 other companies had patents. The last time Apple was evaluating adding Theora support they asked Xiph if they would be willing to submit Theora to a standards body in order to force companies to disclose patents. The Xiph group actually said they would have no issue with doing that, except for the expense of the process,. That is indicative of the whole problem with Theora. People keep claiming it has no patent risk, but there are no publicly available patent searches or submission to standards bodies that would force the major companies to declare their patents, primarily because doing so is expensive. If MS ands it army of lawyers missed patents from over a dozen companies with VC-1, why should we think Theora and On2 could do better?

As much fun as it is to entirely write off a companies rationale because you don't share their concerns does not make those concerns unreasonable. Realistically, if Google wants to open up VP8 it does not improve on the patent situation relative to Theora unless they either submit it to a standards body (at which point they risk finding out there are other patent holders and end up in the same place as H.264), or offer blanket indemnification, which could be unbelievably expensive for them. I suspect it is pretty likely they will submit it to the standards bodies, but if they do it may take a year or two before it is clear whether or not they even own the all the patents.

Posted Feb 23, 2010 23:42 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]