U.S. != world [LWN.net]

U.S. != world

Posted Dec 12, 2007 22:59 UTC (Wed) by lambda (subscriber, #40735)
In reply to: U.S. != world by khim
Parent article: Specifying codecs for the web

Yes, and what you need to remember is that Europe != world. Many of the major developers in 
question happen to be located in the US (Apple, Mozilla, Microsoft, etc), and so they are
liable if 
they infringe on people's patents. The W3C is also in the US, and has a very strong policy
against 
standardizing on anything that requires royalties or has patents that might require royalties.

Furthermore, there has been a lot of pressure to allow software patents in the EU, so it's
possible 
that at any time, a legislative decision will mean that even in Europe, x264 will be illegal.

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