Chiariglione: A crisis, the causes and a solution

Chiariglione: A crisis, the causes and a solution

He's not just talking about MPEG LA dying, he's talking about MPEG dying. Despite the names, the two are surprisingly unrelated.

MPEG is a working group in the ISO, founded by Chiariglione and others in 1988. To a first approximation, their approach to IP has been "everybody contribute whatever tech might help; we'd rather let other people worry about the legal stuff, and we trust people will get together to offer a reasonable license." Involved organizations are supposed to disclose any IP claims, but as long as the patent holders say they'd provide "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory" licenses, the IP claims weren't supposed to affect decisions of what to include.

Honestly, it's remarkable that this kind of loose policy worked as well as it did as long as it did. Navigating five dozen different patent holders' ideas about what constitutes a fair and reasonable license fee is too prohibitive to allow a new format to be adopted. The patent holders are all together better off if they can offer a single simple license so the format will get adopted and they all get royalties. But without MPEG putting policies in place that required more legal clarity, only voluntary collusion held things together. Cartels and collusions are normally unstable; like the prisoner's dilemna, someone is going to defect.

MPEG LA is a patent pool company/cartel founded in 1997 by all the major IP holders for MPEG-2 video. (Plenty of MPEG standards both before and after have had licensing arrangements other than a MPEG LA patent pool; for instance, the MP3 patents were licensed through Thomson/Technicolor.) The MPEG LA managed to get enough of those with IP in h.264 etc to join that they were able to provide full licensing for those standards and split the royalties. But with h.265, two new cartels and a bunch of individual companies all chose to defect.

Here's a previous comment from Chiariglione:

Unfortunately some parties have decided to break the MPEG social contract. The HEVC standard, the latest MPEG standard targeting unrestricted video compression, was approved in January 2013. Close to 5 years later, there is no easy way to get a licence to practice that standard.

What I am going to say is not meant to have and should not be interpreted in a legal sense. Nevertheless I am terribly serious about it. Whatever the rights granted to patent holders by the laws, isn’t depriving billions of people, thousands of companies and hundreds of patent holders of the benefits of a standard like HEVC and, presumably, other future MPEG standards, a crime against humankind?

There are other reasons beyond the FOSS desire for royalty-free formats why this kind of arrangement spells trouble. For instance, the incentive for everyone to try to get some piece of their IP included in the standard - not just to get royalties but to be protected from others (mutual assured destruction) - is high, resulting in pressure towards 'patent soup' rather than clean solutions.