gstreamer decoders

Thank you for the information. I think I grok, but I do have two
questions:

From Allen Harkness on Thursday, 28 January, 2010:
>In response to your specific question, under the Licenses royalties are
>paid on all MPEG-4 Visual/AVC products of like functionality, and the
>Licenses do not make any distinction for products offered for free
>(whether open source or otherwise). But, I do note that the Licenses
>addresses this issue by including annual minimum thresholds below which
>no royalties are payable in order to encourage adoption and minimize the
>impact on lower volume users. In addition, the Licenses also include

What are these thresholds? Ideally, I'd like numbers, but information
on whether it's monetary or downloads is more than I have now.

>maximum annual royalty caps to provide more cost predictability for
>larger volume users.

How does this work in an open source or Free software setup, where
the source code is modifiable and re-distributable? Are downloads
from the licensee only covered?

Two scenarios come to mind:
1) A corporation has a customized (i.e. modified) build of Google's
Chrome (which includes an implmentation of ffmpeg), and then
re-distributes this modified binary to all of the workstations at
the company. Is this covered by Google's license?

2) A corporation downloads one copy of Chrome from Google, and redistributes
these internally to its workstations. Is this covered by Google's license?

3) Same scenarios as above, but for a home user distributing to others.

Thanks!

-Joseph
==========END REPLY==========

I've not received an answer to date. I'll post if they respond back.

Also, I'd like to take this moment to thank Fluendo for providing a licensed method. I hate software patents, particularly for what are otherwise open standards. Maybe we need patentleft to kick things off? It is, after all, another license in the end.

Finally, I'll also go ahead and say that all my videos that I have control over are Theora. :)

I'm glad that I tried. If they're now saying that end users can be held responsible, I will keep these signed licenses (and the entire email chain) in my records. In the event that I am sued my plan is to pull these out and say, "look -- I tried to get licensed -- they refused" and go on about how it doesn't seem quite right to refuse to license to me while also suing me for not being licensed. Anyway, here's the relevant snippet from the email.

"Although our Licenses do not directly provide coverage for an end user and anyone in the product chain may be held responsible for an unlicensed product, a royalty paid for an end product by the end product supplier would render the product licensed in the hands of the end user. Therefore, the end user would not normally pay a royalty to MPEG LA for using such a product, but where a royalty has not been paid, such product is unlicensed.

In this case, as you appear to be the end user, we suggest that you choose a player from a licensed supplier. In that regard, we maintain lists of Licensees in Good Standing to each of our Licenses in the corresponding sections of our website http://www.mpegla.com.

Finally, please note that since you will not benefit from coverage under the Licenses, we will not execute the signed Licenses that you have returned to us."