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New MPEG-4 Licensing Scheme
morcheeba writes: "EETimes is reporting that the licensing of MPEG-4 patents will be substantially different than the existing MPEG-2 licenses. The per-player fee will be substantially cheaper ($0.25 instead of $2.50), but a new "use fee" component of $0.02/hour will be charged to service providers. More on MPEG-4 in general at MacWeek; The MPEG-4 Industry Forum and MPEG LA are handling the licenses."
It looks like they are breathing more life into MPEG2, then. "Use fee" for a data format? That's supposedly a standard? Right.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
When will you learn that Slashdot is a fringe element of society and does not represent the global view. Personally I have CD players, VCRs, DVDs, and TVs that I know contain several dollars of licensing fees each: BIG SHIT. Seriously, who gives a fuck? It pays the people to develop this.
Of course in the grand open source scheme, to avoid paying the licensing fees the OS fanatics will, rather than, say, write their own algorithm, break any protections and claim it as their intellectual right. Of course it totally refutes the open source foundations that their whole little religion is built on, but ignore that...
Just like anything else lately, licensing is going to a pay-per-use scheme as well. What's next? Coin-operated toasters?
Holders of technology are going to eventually price themselves out of the market, if eventually people tire of paying for something every time they use it.
"It begins."
.MP? we have sitting on our hard drives.
It only takes tiny steps to walk off the edge of a cliff. I'm sure eventually they'll propose we pay a small monthly fee (just a trifle, really!) for every
I get a little more militant about this stuff every day. But I don't think I'm wrong, either.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
At that point all you have to do is write your own piece of software that implements the algorithm, and you don't have to pay anybody anything.
Presumably by then there will be new and improved patented algorithms, but it's nice to know that you will always have free technology to use, although sometimes a little outdated. (Or not, the RSA patent has expired and it is still the most popular public-key cryptosystem)
I know the tech world doesn't change that fast, and we have been waiting for mpeg4 for a while, But that MacWeek article is dated Nov. 2000. Somethings might of changed since then
Doesn't sound like much, but after just 125 hours of use, they'll make more money off of this then they ever did off of MPEG-2.
125 hours may sound like a lot, but it's less then 2.5 hours a week for a year. Or just over 20 minutes a day for a year.... I could go on, but I think you get the point.
Although I understand your point, you failed to consider one little thing:
20 years ago, 20K of RAM in a "Personal Computer" was a REAL big deal. Do you still have people hacking out apps for a Vic-20? No. 10 years ago, "who will ever need more than 640k of RAM" was still somewhat in fashion. 20 years from now we'll be laughing at MP4's.
So I'm sorry man, but your solution or proposal or whatever is really not an option. By any means. By the time the coders get their hands on the inards of the thing, we'll be bitching about MP15's.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Actually, it's the other way around. The MPEG group went shopping around for a base file format to use for MPEG-4 and they chose the Quicktime file format as the basis for all MPEG-4 files. I believe they chose it because it is a simple, flexible and (most importantly) free and well-documented standard. Note that this has nothing to do with any of the Quicktime codecs (I know the Sorenson codec is a particular point of contention here on /.) but instead the base file format for all quicktime media. An analogous file format would be the .avi file format. It's simply a wrapper.
Also, note that they said 'service providers'. I would assume this would mean providers that use MPEG-4 for content delivery, such as VOD, much like MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 are used for VOD right now.
I could hardly believe they would so horribly cripple the usefulness of the format by making it so that any player that used the codec would have to report back the time used to some organization so that someone can be billed for it. That's just dumb and I don't see why anyone would touch it with a 10-foot pole if that was the case.
Why should the people be paid to develop things?
Because not all of us are hippies like RMS. Some of us have mouths to feed, and software development is how we support ourselves/families.
Maybe some day, when we finally reach a Star Trek-like utopia and don't need money, all software development can be just for fun and for the betterment of all. Until then, we live in a world where money is the end, and software development might just be the means.
sig: sauer
(Score: 5? Are you kidding me? In the absence of any mod points this week, I reply.)
I'm wondering in the next 10 years how many things we'll no longer own, but be charged as we use them. I think there was a word for this kind of situation... serfdom.
Here I illustrate the use of the "Mad-Libs" method of argument analysis: replace the significant noun and verb in the sentence with other similar words. If the argument sounds silly, draw your own conclusion.
"I'm wondering in the next 10 years how many roads we'll no longer own, but be charged as we drive on them. I think there was a word for this kind of situation... serfdom."
If you don't want to pay the toll, don't drive on the MPEG-4 parkway. It's that simple. There's no need for this sort of hyperbole. If we're talking about wrongful imprisonment or illegal taxation or something, get as morally indignant as you want. But don't dilute that kind of rhetoric by using it on mundane issues like this one.
Let's say you write a program like Zone Alarm that people will use all the time. Let's also say that you charge $20 a copy. You will probably sell a ton of units and you end up making $1 million. You could live off that profit for a while, but eventualy the money would decrese and you might have a finantial insentive to write version 2 of your software and you would include new features that would give consumers an insentive to upgrade and pay you another $20 for the new program. This is good for the consumers because programers would want keep makeing money.
In the subscription model, one could write a program and if it's a good and robust program it could be "in service" for a long time. (I've been using the same copy of Win98 for 3 years, and I don't plan on upgrading for a long time). M$ would have to come up with something with enough cool new fetures before I would pay them any more money.* The point is that I am not paying the software developers any money. But what if I had to send them $50/year to keep using it. They would keep earning money weather they developed new stuff or not.
*I am not trolling for a shouting match over the marits of Win98 v. Win2000 v. WinXP v. WinNT v. MacOS v. Linux. And yes I AM considering moving to a different OS.
Everything that happens in this world that is malevolent in nature....
Are you kidding me? Malevolent? Are you sitting there at your computer with a serious face telling me that the MPEG-4 Forum's licensing scheme is evil?
Of all thing, I would have thought that the events of the past four months would have given us all a sense of perspective. Blowing up buildings is malevolent. Killing people is malevolent. Charging a per-use-hour fee to your customers is business.
Get a grip.
Patents aren't like copyrights... yet.
If there's little that prevents Congress from having insanely long copyright terms, there's just as little preventing the same with patent terms.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
20 years ago, 20K of RAM in a "Personal Computer" was a REAL big deal.
No it wasn't. Even cheap, consumer-grade Atari computers had that much, and even the "stripped down" version had 16K.
Keep in mind how much MPEG1 is still in use and how old that is. It's getting dated, but not many are "laughing at it." MPEG4 may be the hot new thing, but it can't boast the ubiquity, stability, and portability that its ancestor can. Granted it's only twelve years old or so (compared to 17-20), but I really doubt MPEG4 will be on the scale of MPEG1 this year, next year, or the year after that.
You know, even though this is after all slashdot, I'm surprised that I haven't really seen anyone stick up for the MPEG consortium yet.
After all, they have worked for years to bring together technology from all over the world and synthesise it into something that is truly useful.
The kind of mathematics, science and engineering behind something like the MPEG standards isn't something you dream up in a bedroom - it takes a lot of time and money, and as time is money, this means money squared.
If they don't get their money back, then there won't be any more MPEG standards. At the end of the day, this is going to let people make lots of cash off of streaming video to people (whether it be via the net/cable/sat/whatever) - the people who enabled that deserve a reward.
I think it's pretty good of them to allow not-for-profit use of MPEG-4, which will allow people who aren't making money from their use of the technology to make as many MPEG-4 encoded videos as they like.
Sure, maybe the time based charging is dumb and should be rethought, or maybe it's actually pretty sensible (given the markets in which it'll be used, ie digital tv/video etc). The MPEG group is made up of a lot of extremely smart people - don't write them off because they aren't giving away their work into the public domain.
thanks -mike
A couple of observations I should have included, but forget are the following, relating classical economies to artificial scarcity.
RMS has been accused of being a communist because of his notions about intellectual property. However, communism has one great flaw: it seeks to redistribute existing scarce goods without creating incentive to eliminate the scarcity to begin with. That's why it appears to work so well at the beginning: it corrects a terribly skewed distribution of scarce things. While RMS attacks artificial scarcity, communism lumps natural scarcity in there as well. Note that combating natural scarcity requires the incentive to overcome the scarcity of knowledge of knowing how: once know, this knowledge can be kept artificially scarce (or not).
Capitalism, on the other hand, rewards those who can produce scarce goods. In theory, such goods will be delivered in the most efficient manner possible due to free market competition. The free market notion is nice because it does not create a have/have-not dichotomy, at least not in theory: anyone has the potential for success.
Of course, temporary extremes in both these economic models lead to undesireable circumstances that result in some form of government intervention: in the United States, we therefore have a mixed economy (note: many of the injustices attributed to capitalism and free markets can probably be attributed to "mismanagement" of this mixed economy -- this is why libertarians want less government). Recently, China has been experimenting with capitalist incentives within a predominantly communist economy. So, as presently practiced, communism and capitalism (both vulnerable to government corruption, though those of us in capitalist countries tend to think of communist governments are more corrupt), both seek to address scarcity issues, but in different ways. Personally, my bets are on a more capitalist incentive approach, because it offers the possibility of benefiting from short-term scarcity relief (i.e. "getting rich") as well as addressing the long term issues.
Finally, another way to look at the artificial scarcities is not as restrictions enforced by governments, but rather scarcities which do not remain so naturally: software is easy to copy. Heck, digital media in general is easy to copy. Information and knowledge are hard to keep secret. Such scarcities can only exist by the application of force or by concent. Absent concent, they are thus ultimately counterproductive to those who seek to exploit them too much.
You could've hired me.
You should consider posting an opinion piece like this as a link instead.
Isn't that the same thing? We have put together this great new standard in an open forum, but to actually implement it, you have to pay, even a MINOR fee. This would effectively knock out every OSS-type implementation. The $$$ wouldn't be a problem for MS, IBM, Oracle, etc. But for Linux and others it's a deal-killer.
It's my personal opinion that to develop a standard in the open forums and then charge for them is self-defeating. It's not really helped the OMG group very much.
My other beef with the W3C is that I feel they have "lost their edge". How long have various XML standards been sitting on desks? Where is SOAP as a standard? I really don't know. I became irritated and stopped watching last year. They may be done with 1.0, but is there any provision for security? Validation? Or is this to be left to the implementor exclusively?
I've seen this with other groups as well. As a Java code-monkey, I've watched the Java Community Process grind to a near halt as well. The Java SOAP spec is not yet finished, JAXM is farther along, but still not at 1.0. Is there any coherency between JAXM and message-driven EJBs?
Sorry about that long-winded response/rant, but I feel that as these standards organizations embrace more-and-more of a corporate influence they adopt more-and-more of the beurocratic overhead and other issues associated with these corporations. Ultimately they lose their effectiveness.
To the other responder, I really don't know much about JPEG2000. I don't know if your post was a real question or a statement.
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy
Apparently a lot of business types now get it into their heads, to implement some form of 'leasing' on their product, so they only have to work at it once, and then get paid untill hell freezes over (and with the amount of money you can make that way it'll be no problem to buy potential competition off before it can get big enough to stand a chance).
There's two reasons, why potential buyers of such schemes should abstain: The money comes out of their pockets, and throwing so much money in one direction will most probably create a monopolistic structure more concerned with keeping itself in control than making a better product (see Microsoft).
--
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
I also support shorter artificial scarcity rights, but for a very different reason. Let me explain...
The difficult thing for me, as a libertarian, was to come to the conclusion that artificial scarcity rights should be limited at all, since I have a strong sense of property rights.
Also as a Libertarian, I have no problem with these limitations whatsoever. Rights to real property must, of course, be supreme -- but artificial scarcity rights are nothing of the sort; rather, they're a construct created by reducing the range of acts available to others (ie. I am prevented by force of government from building a device equivalent to some patent-encumbered device you created). Your "rights" to intellectual property restrict my freedoms when working with my physical property.
As IP is an artificial construct created through force of government which restricts individuals' freedoms, it need be treated very carefully. Why would something so restrictive be allowed? One possible reason is clearly stated: Promotion of the sciences and useful arts (and thus the public welfare). If an IP system provides government enforcement of patent claims, one need ask: in return for what is the public giving up to the inventor their ability to build a similar device? In a case of unlimited patent rights, the public receives nothing in return, thus leaving no excuse whatsoever for the government's infringement upon their rights. The case where this infringement may be tolerable is if they receive something of value -- such as free access to the (once-)patented work after an expiration of the government-enforced monopoly.
The next question, then, is what price (how many years of limited freedoms) is appropriate to pay for later unlimited access to the once-protected work. The answer, of course, is that price which results in the public's best interests -- the price which results in the most favorable ratio of value (in terms of works which eventually become free for public use) to price (in terms of number of years of protection required).
I, for one, am inclined to believe that the government is currently overpaying -- with the public's freedoms! -- for later free access to these works.
Their ability to set licensing terms can be, and should be, regulated by government so that said licensing (if there's any at all) is strictly so as to achieve the maximum public benefit.
WHAT?? That's awfully Marx-esque, don't you think?
This is a capitalist system, and as such the only responsibilities that a business has is to maximize value for its shareholders and to comply with the laws of the jurisdiction(s) in which it operates.
This system is not perfect, but any system based on the premise that you advocate has been demonstrated to be ultimately a failure.
I like the old saying: capitalism is the second-worst economic system yet devised. The worst economic system is... everything else.