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More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change (The Chromium Blog)More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change (The Chromium Blog)Posted Jan 16, 2011 1:15 UTC (Sun) by roc (subscriber, #30627)In reply to: More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change (The Chromium Blog) by kepstin Parent article: More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change (The Chromium Blog)
You can't ship Fluendo's or ffmpeg's H.264 codecs in a Linux distribution in the USA or Europe without risking a patent lawsuit.
It's funny to read on "Linux Weekly News" someone arguing that Mozilla and Google should give up the fight against patent-encumbered formats and pass the buck to Linux distros.
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More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change (The Chromium Blog) Posted Jan 16, 2011 1:45 UTC (Sun) by tetromino (subscriber, #33846) [Link]
> It's funny to read on "Linux Weekly News" someone arguing that Mozilla and Google should give up the fight against patent-encumbered formats
If you want to avoid using patent-encumbered code, you basically have to avoid using any software written in the past 20 years that is more complicated than "Hello World!". (And even then, if you wrote "Hello World!" in a modern language, your language's standard library almost certainly violates dozens of US patents.)
Attempting to altogether avoid patent-encumbered technology in 2011 is quixotic, and bordering on insane. If you try to do anything interesting, you *will* violate some company's patents. Your choices are not about avoiding patents, but about behaving in a way that lowers your personal risk of ruinous lawsuits.
More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change (The Chromium Blog) Posted Jan 16, 2011 7:00 UTC (Sun) by gmaxwell (subscriber, #30048) [Link]
There is a pretty significant difference between the vague and untested theoretical risk presented by most patents, many of which were registered for purely investor-soothing or defensive purposes by ordinary companies which make ordinary products, and what you see in the codec space: Where the patents are widely and aggressively enforced and collected on, and where the royalty income is the primary or sole income for some of the patent holders.
Patents which are crated with the express intention of encumbering a format are a special case in another regard as well: The claims will usually exactly parallel some mandatory minutia of the format, allowing the patent to be hyper-specific thus making obtaining and enforcing the patent less costly, while removing the risk of invalidation due to prior art without diminishing the potent of the patent for its intended purpose in the slightest.
Furthermore, should a serious patent claim be raised against a browser, for example, then an update can be issued to avoid the issue and thus bound the damage. A patent which reads on a _format_ used for interchange is far more damaging. Moreover, you can choose to avoid software with known patent problems if your sensitivity to risk is great, but it's much harder to pick and choose what formats you work with because you're subjected to the choices other people make.
So sure, patents are problems in many places but I think there are plenty of arguments supporting that the difficulty caused by patents is not uniformly distributed and codes deserve special attention in this area.
More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change (The Chromium Blog) Posted Jan 16, 2011 17:51 UTC (Sun) by Seegras (subscriber, #20463) [Link]
> You can't ship Fluendo's or ffmpeg's H.264 codecs in a Linux
> distribution in the USA or Europe without risking a patent lawsuit.
Actually, software patents are still illegal in Europe. Just because the European Patent Agency is violating the law wholesale does not mean software patents are enforceable.
If the US legalizes extortion in the field of software, so be it; but I'm going to fight against the the same happening in Europe. And in the meantime, I refuse to acknowledge that something as abhorrent as the doings of the EPA even exists.
But of course, in regards of international standards, it's clear you have to go the route of the least common denominator, and if one country decides to allow monopoly rights on a technology, and the designers of that technology encumber it with those monopoly-rights, that pretty well means that this technology is not going to be a standard -- unless that country a) either fixes the law or b) the body decides to get rid of monopoly-rights on said technology. (Well there is c) of course, that what is happening right now: The USA bullies all other countries into adapting its laws).
More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change (The Chromium Blog) Posted Jan 16, 2011 20:42 UTC (Sun) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]
You may not believe software patents are enforceable in Europe, but lots of European companies clearly do since they license H.264 patents and other software patents in Europe.
More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change (The Chromium Blog) Posted Jan 17, 2011 16:32 UTC (Mon) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link]
No, that just means that they believe that the risk of them being enforceable is greater than the savings of not licensing.
More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change (The Chromium Blog) Posted Jan 18, 2011 0:33 UTC (Tue) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
Actually, it's probably a case of "if we have to licence them for the USA, we might as well licence them for the world".
They are NOT enforceable in Europe. One simply has to quote the European Patent Treaty to the Judge and it's "end of court case". Or at least, it is if you can persuade the Judge that your stuff falls into the EXplicitly excluded category, which is all software patents.
Problem is, a bit like in the US, the lawyers like to argue and if they can persuade the Judge that "All Software Patents" is a bit vague and woolly, they might get a result ...
Cheers,
More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change (The Chromium Blog) Posted Jan 17, 2011 11:57 UTC (Mon) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] > Actually, software patents are still illegal in Europe. The problem is, it's possible to patent "a machine that does something", and anyone shipping a hardware device that does something must have a patent license, even if they're using a software implementation of something. (See here, for example.) So codec patents are still a problem for mobile phones and tablet computers.
More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change (The Chromium Blog) Posted Jan 17, 2011 12:15 UTC (Mon) by thomasvs (guest, #36955) [Link]
Not sure why you are lumping Fluendo codecs in with ffmpeg's h264 codecs.
The Fluendo codecs are licensed and legal. If a distro cannot ship them it's probably because they can't or won't pay the licensing fees. But various distros ship with Fluendo codecs; one prominent example is Dell + Ubuntu + Fluendo codecs.
More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change (The Chromium Blog) Posted Jan 17, 2011 23:14 UTC (Mon) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link] But various distros ship with Fluendo codecs; one prominent example is Dell + Ubuntu + Fluendo codecs.Dell's messaging, web site, and offerings are very sorely lacking for Linux on Dell. This is especially true in the US. I wish this weren't so.
More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change (The Chromium Blog) Posted Jan 18, 2011 8:14 UTC (Tue) by DonDiego (subscriber, #24141) [Link]
There is nothing illegal about Fluendo codecs, nor has there ever been. Stop the FUD already!
More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change (The Chromium Blog) Posted Jan 19, 2011 6:55 UTC (Wed) by DonDiego (subscriber, #24141) [Link]
> There is nothing illegal about Fluendo codecs, nor has there ever been. Stop the FUD already!
Haha, how can I blame anybody for being confused, when I cannot even write a single coherent sentence ;-)
I meant that there is nothing illegal about the *FFMPEG* codecs, nor has there ever been.
More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change (The Chromium Blog) Posted Jan 18, 2011 8:22 UTC (Tue) by DonDiego (subscriber, #24141) [Link]
> You can't ship Fluendo's or ffmpeg's H.264 codecs in a Linux distribution in the USA or Europe without risking a patent lawsuit.
Contrary to what is continuously claimed here, there are many distributions that do ship H.264 in Europe and the USA, for example Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo and many others. I can understand that some distros like Red Hat (and thus Fedora) refrain from doing it, but the claim that nobody does it and/or it is impossible is demonstrably false.
More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change (The Chromium Blog) Posted Jan 18, 2011 8:55 UTC (Tue) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]
The standard Ubuntu distribution does not include H.264 "out of the box".
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats
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