LWN: Comments on "H.264, patent licensing, and you (Engadget)"

H.264, patent licensing, and you (Engadget)

rahvin — Thu, 06 May 2010 16:29:41 +0000

Just my 2cents but Google will buy a major chunk of goodwill from me if they release VP8 as FOSS and make a patent pledge for all FOSS (or even better, GPL only) implementations. It might even negate the negative attitude I developed with their android kernel fork BS. In fact doing the FOSS thing on VP8 could destroy MPEG-LA and that would be a VERY good thing.

H.264, patent licensing, and you (Engadget)

Trelane — Thu, 06 May 2010 15:48:55 +0000

Or if you don't produce anything.

H.264, patent licensing, and you (Engadget)

gouyou — Thu, 06 May 2010 15:36:38 +0000

A point missed by the article: someone out there might have a set of other patents on H.264 and not be willing to license them to MPEG-LA (like AT&T): everybody might be on the hook for a few 100M$.

The only point in time when you'll be sure to be clear of the patent trouble is when all of them are expired.

H.264, patent licensing, and you (Engadget)

bawjaws — Thu, 06 May 2010 15:20:07 +0000

I don't think anyone disputes that Vorbis is better than MP3, both in audio quality and a few other technical aspects. Everything but marketshare really though that's mostly due to Apple not supporting it. It's a close run thing regarding quality between the tag-team of AAC/AAC+ (separately licenced codecs from the same family, one tuned for lower bitrates) and Vorbis though, probably tipping towards Vorbis if you want to encode using open source code.

Vorbis seems an obvious choice for Google. Sun Microsystems tried to build a video codec from scratch to avoid patents a couple of years ago. They were totally strict about not stepping on anyone's video patents. For audio they just used Vorbis.

I think people will be pleasantly surprised to see how widely used Vorbis will become as a result of Google opening VP8 (assuming they do etc.).

I also think that mp3 audio is one of the best arguments against H.264 fees. It might be the bees-knees today, but you do you still want to be paying fees on it (and a bunch of other codecs, old and new) when it's markedly outperformed by other codecs in 10 years time, based purely on market lock-in?

patience please

dmarti — Thu, 06 May 2010 15:13:12 +0000

Google can't release a codec under an Innovation-Compatible patent license until the Google lawyers square things with the patent trolls. Ideally they also have to acquire one or more patents that they could use as a deterrent to keep MPEG LA in line.

Then it's just a matter of tuning the YouTube servers to let the content encoded with the new codec buffer a little extra, and the content encoded with h.264 buffer not quite enough. Then everyone will say "h.264 sux, it skips all the time."

Apple sues Apple

loevborg — Thu, 06 May 2010 13:17:56 +0000

Candidly speaking, I'm amazed at the appositeness of the comment, as I am often on this forum.

H.264, patent licensing, and you (Engadget)

DOT — Thu, 06 May 2010 11:59:13 +0000

I've mentioned it a few times on the WHATWG mailing list, but nobody really cares. It'll just follow whatever Google decides to use with VP8.

H.264, patent licensing, and you (Engadget)

AndreE — Thu, 06 May 2010 11:32:13 +0000

It is exciting! Come Google, some sort of VP8 announcment already!

On a side note, I find it interesting that no one has been talking about the AUDIO element for HTML5. That's a battle to be fought out between mp3, ogg, and (!)wav. Leaving .wav aside the same issues apply RE patents. And this time, ogg is definitely a strong competitor (if not outright superior) to mp3.

H.264, patent licensing, and you (Engadget)

ikm — Thu, 06 May 2010 08:21:59 +0000

And then there's VP8 looming. Should the Google unveil it to general public under a liberal license, MPEG-LA would undoubtedly start trying to poke holes in it using its prominent patent pool. This whole battle over online video is quite exciting.

H.264, patent licensing, and you (Engadget)

xnox — Thu, 06 May 2010 03:04:33 +0000

I haven't read anything different or new when comparing to all the other blogospheres I'm following..... their edition was full of Engadget toungue in cheek and funny puns.

The do paid journalism and this is one way or the other way paid for (i haven't seen anyone yet getting any words out of MPEG-LA) but Engadget has enough page views to choose not to run a story even if someoone pays a lot.

All for paid articles do start with "So and so invited us to chat to them about this and that." And then it continues on "when we tried to press this button it didn't work and we were asked to move on"

H.264, patent licensing, and you (Engadget)

rahvin — Thu, 06 May 2010 00:27:17 +0000

You should lose respect for them, the author wrote a press release for MPEG-LA and marketed it as news. He hit every single talking point that MPEG-LA has been using and I wouldn't be surprised if MPEG-LA paid them to do it. Paid "journalism" is quite common and most people don't realize it. I mistakenly believed that engadget didn't engage in it, but it's clear that's not the case anymore. That "story" was nothing more than a paid advertisement and FUD expedition for MPEG-LA.

What's interesting to me is how much this stuff is being talked about recently, I can only conclude it's fear by the patent holders that Google will release VP8 for free and emasculate their patent revenues.

H.264, patent licensing, and you (Engadget)

rahvin — Thu, 06 May 2010 00:22:01 +0000

And suddenly you get a letter saying if you don't start paying $xxxxx per year they will sue you and make you pay their legal fees. Ask the sports bars what they think about having to pay fees to air publically broadcast sports. If the bars fail to pay they get sued by the organization (who's name escapes me at the moment) that the sports monopolies have tasked with enforcement.

Same thing will happen with H.264, they are going to let it go for 5 years, then enforce a royalty and go after everyone by hiring an agency to do it for them. They will send letters and engage in campaigns just like the BSA does and everyone will get soaked for money. This is one of the reasons software patents are bad. Lets be honest, these compression patents are nothing but mathematical algorithms that should not be patentable. It makes my skin crawl to think that some organization can pool patents on mathematical operations and then sue people for using that math.

H.264, patent licensing, and you (Engadget)

literfizzer — Thu, 06 May 2010 00:11:07 +0000

No kidding! Does this guy really think Google's going to suck it up and let royalty payments for H.264 content eat a hole in its profits?

And what if I want to put my own H.264-encoded content up for free download on my own web site? Now I have to count downloads and make royalty payments?

I just lost a lot of respect for Engadget.

H.264, patent licensing, and you (Engadget)

bojan — Wed, 05 May 2010 23:30:02 +0000

Hilarious. Users don't have to pay. Since when? Users ultimately pay for _everything_.

Now, if anyone still thinks software patents are good for progress, just consider how much time and money it's going to cost to just come to an agreement here. That, to me, seems like obstruction of progress.

And, the five year "we'll hook you on our drugs first" period is just lovely.

H.264, patent licensing, and you (Engadget)

JoeBuck — Wed, 05 May 2010 22:56:07 +0000

If you sign up with MPEG-LA and follow their rules, then you don't have to be worried about lawsuits because of patents in their patent pool. But Theora is designed not to infringe any of the patents in that pool, so the main danger to Theora would be over some other patent not in that pool. But if such a patent exists, then H.264 might also infringe it, and then you're unsafe with either technology.
<p>
Now, it might be possible that the Theora people didn't do the job correctly, and there is some patent that is part of the MPEG-LA pool that they infringe. But that's a finite set of patents that could be checked for such a possibility. Other than that, what am I missing?
<p>
But there could be lurking patent trolls out there seeking a much bigger target: all those who use H.264. After all, Alcatel dug out a patent to go after MP3 users at a very late date, including those (like Microsoft) who were fully paid up members of the MP3 patent consortium. (Alcatel ended up losing only after years in the courts).

Apple sues Apple

man_ls — Wed, 05 May 2010 21:41:00 +0000

Is this the same Larry Horn who, as president of MPEG-LA, is suing one of its own members? Of course it is. Not too comforting, this guy would sue his own mother for copying his gene pool.

H.264, patent licensing, and you (Engadget)

wmf — Wed, 05 May 2010 20:54:12 +0000

Don't worry, we're going to have it all over again in three weeks.

H.264, patent licensing, and you (Engadget)

Russ.Dill@gmail.com — Wed, 05 May 2010 20:34:48 +0000

80 people/day * 365 days/year * $0.02/disc * 2 disc/person (1 given per photographer) = $1168/year.

H.264, patent licensing, and you (Engadget)

Trelane — Wed, 05 May 2010 20:09:04 +0000

I dunno about you, but "they *probably* won't sue you" doesn't sound very reassuring.

H.264, patent licensing, and you (Engadget)

cowsandmilk — Wed, 05 May 2010 19:58:15 +0000

according to http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20000101-264.html , it would be 2 cents per disc. Of course, going after tour operators for such small sums is uneconomical for MPEG-LA, so the producer of the disc can ignore it.

H.264, patent licensing, and you (Engadget)

Russ.Dill@gmail.com — Wed, 05 May 2010 19:05:45 +0000

He seems to totally miss the point that by requiring license payments for distributing decoders, users are required to directly or indirectly pay to watch video. He also skirts across the commercial distribution aspect. I just went on a tour where we are provided with a photo CD for an extra charge. If that photo CD included h264 video, would they not be required to pay an extra fee for that distribution?

Lawyers are worthless

kragil — Wed, 05 May 2010 18:24:49 +0000

That guy basically says: Only sellers of encoders und encoded content have to pay, but the only basis for that claim is some anonymous MPEG-LA contact.
Yeah right, I will trust what some internet blog says instead of what is written in the H.264 license agreements.

W3C has to push for a free internet and a free video codec. What good is it if it can't even do that?

BTW: I really don't like that Canonical is feeding those crooks by paying for H.264. No more support from me. They obviously have too much money.

H.264, patent licensing, and you (Engadget)

jmm82 — Wed, 05 May 2010 18:23:59 +0000

I was going to quote that just as I saw your post so here is the reference:

"On top of that, there's a gigantic exception to the license rules that should put any lingering fears to rest: using H.264 to distribute free internet video to end users doesn't cost a thing, and won't cost anything until at least 2015. After that, it's up in the air, and that's a bridge we'll have to cross when we come to it -- there's a chance the MPEG-LA could start charging a royalty for free video in five years. But for right now MPEG-LA president Larry Horn says the group doesn't want to "plug a royalty into a business model that's still unsettled."

That statement does exactly the opposite of putting away any lingering fears.
The fear will have to linger for 5 years until we are all stuck in a trap.

H.264, patent licensing, and you (Engadget)

dgilmore — Wed, 05 May 2010 18:21:42 +0000

So come 5 years we will be in the same place as mp3 etc, here is some free crack. we will come back and change you later. I fear that something with funky licensing and unclear anything is only going to end bad.

H.264, patent licensing, and you (Engadget)

Trelane — Wed, 05 May 2010 18:12:44 +0000

Didn't we *just* have this argument a couple of days ago? :)