FFmpeg vs. MPEG-LA royalties

> You cut this out in your reply which makes my point clear:

> > I would have a hard time obtaining a patent licence grant only for
> myself and then distributing Free Software affected by such a grant to
> others, but I guess my own standards of behaviour are different from
> those of others.

> In case it isn't obvious to you, I'm putting myself in Google's position
> here.

So you want them to get a patent license valid for every person on earth? That basically means buying out all those patents. Do you think such a thing would be available at all? At a price Google would be willing and able to pay?

The alternative would be for Google to not get a patent license and exclude itself from using multimedia technologies. That's not an option. And please don't start the Theora fairy tales again, it's not an alternative.

> Which brings us back to the patent licensing controversy where Google's
> licence covers Google, naturally, and Google's "evangelists" insist that
> they're not violating the licensing terms of FFmpeg even according to
> the spirit of those terms.

>By "the spirit of those terms" take a look at the first quote above. And
> if the FSF's legal opinion were to stand on this matter, one would have
> to reassess Google's position beyond the mere spirit of those terms.

What do you call the "FSF's legal opinion" on the matter? I know for sure that Eben Moglen agrees with us (FFmpeg) that patent side deals do not have any bearing at all on LGPLv2.1-licensed code, such as FFmpeg. The Software Freedom Law Center works for FFmpeg, BTW.

> Naturally, the participants in the FFmpeg project, which I presume
> includes yourself,

Correct. My name is Diego Biurrun and I work on FFmpeg.

> may not need to worry about being served with an injunction. After all,
> why would the cartel want to prevent the proliferation of software which
> is, according to them, subject to their licensing programme? It's a nice
> way of generating business.

Your bitterness does FFmpeg a disservice. We're a big part of the free software computing stack, thus making Desktop Linux viable. In this day and age, computing without multimedia support is unthinkable.