H.264 support coming to Firefox

They already raised the annual cap from $5m to $6.5m/yr in the last licensing update. The per-unit fees are subject to a 10% increase per-cycle limit, but the annual caps are not... and the annual caps are what matter to the major parties that really drive compatibility requirements. This will be doubly effective with many of the major hardware vendors being H.265 licensors and all of them eager to keep the users on the hardware upgrade hamster wheel.

MPEG-LA will also continue to add patents to the pool in order to extend the its life. This has been seen with MPEG2— it originally had ~27 patents and now has almost a thousand (and more than 130 US patents, so the increase isn't just from catching international variants). We'll see the same with H.264/AVC, in fact, last year they added three recently granted patents to the essential patent list from just Apple alone.

We've also got room for a good two full codec generations before the current AVC pool begins to expire in earnest.

Exactly how WebM is hopeless? IIRC, most of the video on the web are coming out of youtube and they are available as webm. HW support for it is coming, but of course hw is slow, so some more time is needed.

Last, but not least, it's sad to see firefox too putting mobile ahead of everything else (after KDE and GNOME doing so). As a heavy desktop person, who doesn't have or care for a smartphone, this is very annoying.

How so ? Mozilla, as I understand it, is a non-profit. So they don't have the usual "fiduciary responsibilities" cop-out. They aren't forced to support anything that would go against their mission statement.

>>That is sad but true, if you ignore a dominant technology, you will become irrelevant, even if it is nonstandard, proprietary or patented.

>>The only defense against this is to prevent nonstandard, proprietary or patented technologies from becoming dominant on the web.

The first logical step for this prevention would be, in my opinion, to not support it.

>>Becoming irrelevant isn't an option for Mozilla and Opera, because they would then lose any ability to promote open standards altogether.

In my opinion Mozilla's claim to fame in the current world of many fast competitive browsers, is being the champion of an open and unencumbered web.
If they can't do that, they're quickly becoming irrelevant already.

If they feel they are in not a position where they can say "no" to supporting known software patents, the current greatest threat to software freedoms, as a part of the web, what's the reason for their existence ? To produce a very popular browser ? There are several takers doing a good job in that department already.

I also feel that "irrelevant" and "less popular" are being used interchangeably in most arguments concerning this decision, even though they're not, and it confuses any argument.
They could become "less popular" for the time being, but I doubt very much they would become completely "irrelevant".

I understand Mozilla's predicament to a certain extent, but I don't feel pandering to commercial interests was in their (and our) own long term benefit in this case.

In this case it is the contributing authors/inventors of the H.264 standard who have created these patents—not some random trolls.

Even if H.264 was especially uninventive, they could always patent the detailed interactions of trivial but essential details: "code this bit after that bit and multiply by two". It's possible that a few—many, perhaps—of the patents are inapplicable due to mistakes in their drafting or are invalid due to prior art. But there are thousands of them, with tens of thousands of claims total. It is inconceivable—considering the quantity and that these are patents by the authors of the format in question—that all the claims would be invalid or inapplicable.

Moreover, these patents are actively and successfully enforced. This is not a hypothetical risk, and the enforcement you hear about is the minority where NDAs didn't manage to hide the existence of the enforcement entirely. Many parties, including powerful ones (who could afford a patent fight), find the threat credible enough to pay up. Indeed, if you receive a legal threat for H.264 and you ask an attorney for advice you will be told to _SETTLE_: there is no question of fighting these patents.

It's also the case that you won't find anyone competent claiming that the patents are inapplicable—quite the opposite: patents are only included in the MPEG-LA pools after review by an independent expert who appraises them to be essential. The inclusion of a non-essential patent would violate the process MPEG-LA laid out for the DOJ in their business process review. This process might be corrupt rubbish, but its existence surely raises the bar for someone who wants to waive away applicability.

It might be another matter if you had some H.264 implementation where the authors were saying "we carefully worked around all the patents and didn't implement parts of the specification that we couldn't work around"—but we don't have that here. The best you can get from the authors of open source H.264 implementations is "We don't know, we read the specs by the authors of the patents, not the patents themselves." but more commonly they too just tell you that you need licensing.

Unlike WebM, a practicing entity who would seek to enforce these patents is not even potentially impeded by retaliation clause-enabled licensing—they're free to enforce. Every person who adopts H.264 in the hope they'll be left alone is another target that any of the patent holders of the format (or other parties) can pick and choose from to maximize their revenue.

Sometimes, often even, ignoring patent risks is prudent—it's just too hard and ineffective to look—but here even an idiot wouldn't consider this riskless. The work has been done, the patents found applicable by experts, which should come as no shock because this is all by design. Sometimes ignoring patents is a productive act of civil disobedience. But in this case? In this case ignoring the patents is just helping to feed the monster—your use of his formats builds network effects that provide him an endless stream of tasty victims.

As an aside, it seems you've fallen into a common misunderstanding with respect to "software patents". "Software patent" is a term of art referring to patents drafted without any reference to a physical embodiment, basically the same thing as business method patents. Most codec patents are not "software patents"; rather than purely abstract language they write claims like "A decoder comprising:" or "A computer readable medium storing a computer program that is executable by at least one processor". These claims are not "software patents" as they refer to real devices which perform tangible actions, but you can infringe, or induce people to infringe, via software all the same.

(Actual software patents are a problem for Free Software too—they're what enable the patenting of abstract applicationless concepts of linked lists and suchlike things. But when you connect an idea with a concrete real world impacting application—producing a machine or transformation, if you will—you have something patentable.)

This is one reason why H.264's pool can contain over two thousand patents from 53 distinct countries (AT:36, AU:35, BE:34, BG:15, CA:24, CH:32, CN:129, CY:13, CZ:27, DE:82, DK:33, EE:13, ES:57, FI:40, FR:82, GB:81, GR:22, HK:29, HU:21, ID:27, IE:27, IL:1, IN:18, IS:1, IT:64, JP:530, KR:190, LI:32, LT:1, LU:13, LV:1, MC:12, MT:1, MX:36, MY:13, NL:63, NO:1, NZ:1, PH:1, PL:1, PT:28, RO:11, RU:18, SE:45, SG:12, SI:17, SK:16, TH:1, TR:28, TW:21, US:291, VN:3, ZA:1), even though "software patents" are more impermissible in some places than others. And perhaps most importantly: there is a presumption of validity for granted patents. The US Supreme Court recently had the opportunity to deny patent protection for software and, although they narrowed business method patents, clearly and explicitly stopped short of excluding software.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that the courts are bound by computer science navel-gazing. We define the tomato to be a vegetable for the purpose of commerce. This isn't because the lawmakers are ignorant of botany—it's because the law is concerned with achieving the 'correct' legal and social effect. Software-powered systems are the core of many of the most valuable and important inventions today. The same kind of autistic but-software-is-math arguments could easily be extended to argue that anything is math: "But what is a cotton gin but an arrangement of atoms, which could be run on a molecular simulator with the same behavior—it's just math! unpatentable!". The courts say "Nonsense! This is clearly an invention with measurable, commercially significant applications and influence on the real world; the application of these techniques are patentable like any other invention, and to do otherwise would moot the system."