Montgomery: It's not a strawman after it comes true

At his blog, Xiph.org's Monty Montgomery writes about a potentially alarming change in the licensing of the AAC audio codec. "After Cisco's h.264 Open h.264 announcement, Via Licensing, which runs the AAC licensing pool, pulled the AAC royalty fee list off their website. Now the old royalty terms (visible here) have been replaced by a new, apparently simplified fee list that eliminates licensing sub-categories, adds a new, larger volume tier and removes all the royalty caps. Did royalty liability for AAC software implementations just become unlimited?" An un-capped license fee for AAC could do serious damage to the viability of Cisco's free-as-in-beer H.264 plugin, but Montgomery cautions against leaping to conclusions too quickly.